| Kilgannon |
It’s September 23, 2008, with Pat Branch Larson and Sandra Lewis Nisbet. This is Anne Kilgannon interviewing for the Women’s History Consortium for the ERA Project. We’re in Pat’s dining room. Can you tell me, just to start off, where you were born? We’ll start with you, Pat. And then grew up. And we’ll get you into college and a little bit beyond. Could you tell me that?
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| Larson |
Well, I was born in Arizona, in the Depression. My folks had a very interesting early life, and I grew up on stories of an adventurous life by a couple of people who had a great love of life, had a lot of love for everybody. I was in an extremely happy, loving family. They were married three years and sort of had this wild, lovely adventure in northern Arizona during the Depression. My father had a small pension from the Marine Corps and they basically lived off the land for three years. Finally my mother said, “Okay, we’re going to have a kid now. And we’re going to have to make a decent living.” So that’s the environment that I came in.
She came from a very, very, very big, loving, generous family. He came from a really screwed up family. And he was always very grateful for having stumbled into a really stable family after having had, I think you could call it, a psychologically abusive childhood. But he was a wonderful man. I always felt like I was the luckiest person in the world. All my friends loved my family. Everybody wanted to be around them. So I just think that I had a really, really good start in life. I always felt very confident because of all of this stability.
I was a good student, and I loved school, I loved college. Just sort of backed into doing theater in college. Tried out for a play and got a good role. And sort of, I don’t know, I never set off to be an actress or anything like that. I look back on my whole life and I think this might be true of a lot of women of that era. Really never thought about a career. Really just thought about, at some point I would get married. In the meantime, I’d try to figure out something that would be a nice way to live.
So of course, after I got out of college, you know, what are you going to do with a degree in theater? So that’s when Sandie and I just sort of took a year off and went to Europe. We didn’t really know each other. Didn’t know each other except to maybe say hello in the hall. We were both drama majors. So we took off and went to Europe for six months and became fast friends. And we’ve been friends ever since. And we’ve often thought about, we’ve met other women who were traveling in Europe at that time. And what it was, you either really took to each other, or you couldn’t stand each other. Because you were, you know, right on top of each other all the time. So we took to each other. And so we’ve remained friends from then until this very day. And we have sort of followed each other around for many years.
And luckily, after we got married, our husbands really liked each other, too. And we had kids sort of roughly the same age. And our kids liked each other. So as a couple, and as a family, as couples and families, we remained really close.
So then Eric, my husband, got a fellowship to go up to Oregon to work on a PhD. And so I, after we got there—I basically didn’t pay any attention to these things—but after we got there, then I discovered I could get a scholarship, too. So why not go to school? So I got a master’s degree in theater.
In the meantime, Sandie and Chuck had come up to sort of get us launched in school. And Chuck decided well, this looks like a good deal, I think I’ll go to graduate school here, too. So anyway, they followed us up. So we were together in graduate school.
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| Kilgannon |
And what about when was this?
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| Nisbet |
It was during the ‘60s.
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| Larson |
I graduated in ’56 from college. Sandie graduated in ’58.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah. Right. Right.
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| Larson |
Because she took a year off as a senior to go to Europe somewhere around here. And then, yeah, it was probably 1960 when we went into graduate school. In the meantime, she’ll tell you what’s happening to her.
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| Kilgannon |
Right. Okay.
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| Larson |
But anyway, we ended up all of us together in graduate school at the University of Oregon. Sandie, she’ll tell you, she was teaching a couple of years there at Oregon State University because she already had her master’s.
Anyway, long story short, we ended up different parts of the world after graduate school. Eric and I ended up in Connecticut. They ended up in UCLA. And then Evergreen opened, and we had a mutual friend who was Mervyn Cadwallader, who was the first dean here. And he called us and said, “Got a great school. Got a great idea here. A wonderful school. Come and look at it and see if you wouldn’t like to work here.” This is–
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| Kilgannon |
Right at the beginning?
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| Larson |
Absolutely. So they both came, came on a joint recruitment thing. And both of them decided they really liked it. And we all thought, “Oh, boy, here we are, back together again.” So Eric and Chuck both were part of the first-year original faculty at Evergreen. So that’s how we ended up back here at Evergreen.
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| Kilgannon |
Okay. Well, Sandie?
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| Nisbet |
How can I follow that? Okay. Well, I was born in Honolulu, Hawaii. And I was born there because my mother was born there, and my grandmother was born there, and I guess my great grandmother. I guess we go back, not all the way back to the missionaries, but we go back quite a ways. And my father was born in England, Manchester, England. His parents died when he was eight years old. And he spent two years in an orphanage and then was raised by his sister, sixteen years his elder, in Canada. And when he was about nineteen years old, his sister announced that there had been a little money that he didn’t know about. And so a friend told him, “If you have any money, go off to Hawaii where the streets are paved with gold, and the women are beautiful.” [laughter] So that’s how my father ended up in Hawaii and met my mother. And we came back here.
I’m the eldest of five. And we came back here after Pearl Harbor. You know, tucked underneath beds in a big ship. We landed in San Francisco, and eventually in San Jose, where Pat’s family was. We traveled around and ended up in San Jose. And went to school there. And like Pat, I loved school, had a great time in school. And had a great time in college. And actually was kind of driven by my father’s expectations to be a good student. So I was a good student, mostly because of that. But then we both ended up at San Jose State. And I majored in drama and English, partly again because that was Dad’s push, promoting not just theater, though he had been in theater.
Yes, it was incredible to meet Pat. And we took off in the late fifties, actually, for Europe, when women were not traveling by themselves. And I took time out to earn some money to do that. That was really—I think for both of us, but maybe even more for me, because I was kind of in la-la land about politics, but Pat came from a very active political family—but it really did change my life.
That trip to Europe, were we gone five months? Something like that. It was earth shattering.
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| Larson |
It opened up—
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| Nisbet |
In a wonderful way. We are not the center of the universe. We are not. Not everyone in the world would give anything to be in America. I mean, this was all news to me. Of course, my father was, what do you call it, not a converted citizen…
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| Larson |
Naturalized.
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| Nisbet |
Naturalized citizen. To him, it was his new center of the world. So anyway, that Europe trip was not only being able to bond with my dear friend, but to see the world and have that kind of experience; also I realized I loved traveling, and wanted to do more.
So, I went off to graduate school following a professor who moved from Stanford to Indiana. So I got my master’s degree from Bloomington, Indiana. And that’s where I met my husband, who was in Economics. And we ended up coming out to California. And we were very fortunate to spend time during his PhD program at Oregon with Eric and Pat. We ended up in South America. And that also was very exciting.
So I think traveling in those early years, as a single person and then as a married person with kids, really did, as you say, open up the world, and politicized one.
And then thinking about women, when I was in graduate school, I had one other experience that I think really changed me. And that was I worked—as a graduate student my professors chose me to go to the Indiana Women’s State Prison in Bloomington one day a week, and work with prisoners there. Now Pat, before we got together, had a history of being very politically active on the east coast. And really understood what the ERA was all about, where I didn’t have that experience. But again, I had a real education during those weeks at Indiana at the prison.
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| Kilgannon |
Can you say what you learned?
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| Nisbet |
I ended up directing a play and working with their journals and so forth. It was just mind blowing.
What I learned, really, frankly, what I learned is that—at least I came out of there thinking wow, if you are wealthy and have a lawyer, you would not spend time in prison like this. And I could tell stories that are as vivid to me today as they were then about these women. And all of them were poor women. And that, also, is a politicizing thing to me.
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| Kilgannon |
Sure, yes, that’s an important insight.
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| Nisbet |
Right. And it was just a thrill, it was a thrill to work with them and to learn from them. So I think that was maybe the most influential background I had for coming with passion into the women’s movement, along with Pat updating me in terms of what had been going on with the ERA while I was doing other things.
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| Kilgannon |
You were doing enough so that when she was talking about it, it resonated?
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| Nisbet |
No question. Pat’s also a historian. There was just no question—was never, except I realized that I had—okay, backing up a little bit, when we were in Los Angeles, I was teaching theater, teaching acting in Hollywood, just a part-time job. And I could remember as we talked about these things, the stereotype kinds of roles that I was dealing with just merrily as an acting teacher. Not really giving much thought to the substance of inequality and what that meant in play after play after play, and in scene after scene after scene. You know, really kind of stuck in that tradition.
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| Kilgannon |
It was the culture.
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| Nisbet |
It was the culture. And so through Pat, it was truly an awakening for me. And I would add, with zeal.
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| Larson |
Yeah, so maybe I–
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| Nisbet |
Talk about that.
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| Larson |
I kind of skipped over how I got to thinking about all of these things. Basically, my husband’s an anthropologist. So when we were doing field work, I was always tagging along with him when he got his grants to do field work. And so we did field work together, Sandie and Chuck and Eric and I in Colombia.
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| Kilgannon |
So your husband, Sandie, was also an anthropologist?
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| Larson |
No, he was an economist. But anyway, so there we were in Colombia together, as well as, that was an early kind of research. And then, when they actually got posted studying for their PhDs and so forth, my husband and I went to a really, really isolated island called Tikopia in the South Pacific. And I’m talking about, you would consider it the end of the world. I mean basically, it was this tiny little island, a mile and a half by a mile, in the center of the ocean. Nothing else within five hundred miles close. And five hundred miles, there was another little island. Isolated. And when we got on the island, we’d heard they were going to have a radio that we could call off. Well, of course no, they didn’t. You got dropped on the island. And basically there was no, there was no communication. And they didn’t even stay overnight, the ship didn’t even stop overnight on the island.
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| Kilgannon |
Dumped you on shore and just left?
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| Larson |
Yes. Absolutely. Because it was an unsafe anchorage. And there was no money, no Western, nothing really very Western about this island. People still lived in a totally traditional way.
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| Kilgannon |
Perfect for an anthropologist.
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| Larson |
It was a wonderful, wonderful experience. But–
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| Kilgannon |
Difficult for you?
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| Larson |
Very difficult for me. Because, I realized, what happened there was I thought that I had a good understanding of what variations in culture were. Because I’d been traveling in Europe, and I’d been traveling in South America, and living in villages and so forth. And anything that most people would consider really kind of extreme circumstances. But this was something beyond. Way, way beyond. And what I really saw there was I saw my own culture in a way that I don’t think I could have ever seen it before. And I came back after that experience with real culture shock about my own culture. So I came back totally ready to see everything differently than I had been believing up to that point in my life.
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| Kilgannon |
To see it for the first time?
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| Larson |
To see it for the first time. And this is a Polynesian group of people that we were living with. Where, in fact, women had quite an egalitarian role. It was not an oppressive role. And all that influence that the East has, and all the Pacific Islanders, the Polynesians and the Micronesians in the sense of there being a sense of community that comes before the individual. And this was an extremely important thing for me. Because I had really grown up believing that individual whole thing. And what I really came to see from them was the individual has far more freedom in a society that really looks out for the group, because they’re not always worried about taking care of themselves. They’re not always worried about making a point. They’re not always worried about being an individual. There’s so much confidence that comes to that person from that general society that they, I thought, they ended up being far more individualistic than when I came back here and just saw everybody following like sheep, and calling themselves individuals.
Anyway, so what this meant was that I came back and I just saw my whole society so differently, that I was very ready to see the role of women as needing to be reexamined. And so I was really ripe for the women’s movement. And of course, I’m sure other people have talked to you about the fact that it really did grow out of Vietnam Era.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, actually, no. No one has talked about that, because that hasn’t been true for everyone.
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| Larson |
Okay. Well, it certainly was for me. My husband Eric was teaching at the University of Connecticut, and it was one of the hotbeds during that period of time with the anti Vietnam War thing, and we were very involved in it. And maybe three years into the movement, the women in the movement started thinking, you know, we’re doing an awful lot of the work here, and we’re not getting any credit at all. What’s going on here? So you just start making that next little step.
And so women’s groups started actually growing up out of that. So that it slightly separated. Not that we at that point were thinking about women’s rights. But it was like well, we can get together and we can make some decisions on our own. And we don’t just have to be accessories to the men who are making the decisions. We can also be involved in that in a very independent way.
And I can remember, this is so clear in my mind. We were having a meeting in my living room of all women. Largely faculty wives, because that was what happened. Your husband got a job, and you had a degree, too, but mostly you couldn’t get work. So an awful lot of very educated women sitting around in this room. And there was one woman sitting in the corner, knitting, looking like Miss Typical Housewife. You can’t imagine how typical she looked. And she’s sitting there. We’re all thinking, well what could we do, what could we do to get attention? What could we do to really make an impact, and so on. And she says, “Well, why don’t we take over the ROTC building and turn it into a daycare center?” [laughter] And so we did! And I’ll tell you–
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| Kilgannon |
Radical!
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| Larson |
That got attention. And yes, so that was the kind of thing that was going on. And then before you knew it, what we referred to in those days, a light bulb goes off in your head. And all of a sudden you think—you see something and you think, that’s not fair! So then all of these consciousness raising groups started growing up. And I think an awful lot of them were outgrowths of the Vietnam movement.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, in the anti Vietnam movement, everyone was talking about oppression and that sort of thing. And perhaps suddenly you notice that “there was oppression here, too.”
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| Larson |
Absolutely. That’s exactly what was going on.
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| Nisbet |
I think also what’s interesting about that, later on, when we get to talking about our programs, and why we chose historical material, you know, there is this sequence of the Civil War and the abolitionists and suffragists, and then suddenly, what, a hundred and something years later, you have the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Movement. Somehow it’s not coincidence that those things happened. It’s like, “Me, too!” What’s going on as more and more groups become, I don’t know if the word is confidence, but there was terrific confidence gained in our Movement by it being okay to trust other women. Because that’s another part of the culture we could talk about, how it was more the idea that women don’t trust each other, and they’re gossipy. And once women really started getting together–
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| Kilgannon |
Getting outside the nuclear family?
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| Nisbet |
–and got over that idea, which, in a way, was rather intimidating to other people sometimes, but you know, there is kind of a groundswell from below, and you know, from there we could talk about other groups that started really coming into the movement.
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| Kilgannon |
So, did you also go through the consciousness raising aspect like this?
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| Nisbet |
Oh, yes. I think that initially it felt more individual, partly, well, definitely because of my connection with Pat. And then once we started working with consciousness-raising, the research and so forth, but I had been really one of those married women who felt responsible for anything that went wrong in the household. And nobody laid that on me. My husband did not lay that on me. He did not say that.
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| Kilgannon |
It was just “in the air?”
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| Nisbet |
But there’s just something about that, you know, there’s something. We used to tell the story about, you know, if a kid’s sick, if the dog throws up, “oh my God, I must have done it!” So I came out of that feeling. And I think that I had this kind of individual awakening. But then once we started working, it was just, you could not go back. And it wasn’t always easy, but you could not go back to it.
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| Kilgannon |
You both were born in the thirties. Grew up in the war years, the early post-war years, what some people think is almost the most domesticated era in history. Early fifties and the whole “back to the kitchen” movement, as some people saw it. And then the culture started to take some new forms.
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| Larson |
The interesting thing to that, all the little history that you drew out, is it’s a cliché, almost, but that it’s very true, as a matter of fact. But what is often overlooked is in the fifties, yes, we were all told to go back and be good housewives. But you have to remember that we grew up during this period when we saw really strong women portrayed in movies. I look back and you think of all those wonderful movies in the thirties and forties of Rosalind Russell–
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| Nisbet |
Katherine Hepburn.
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| Larson |
And Katherine Hepburn and all. So those images were in our minds just as much as the goofy forever–
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| Nisbet |
Of course, I’m no Doris Day.
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| Larson |
Yeah. And pretty spunky. But a lot of these women were spunky, but they all ended up sacrificing for their man. Now, that wasn’t always true in some of these early movies in the thirties and forties. Anyway, so I think we had–
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| Kilgannon |
But did you also see women during the war years work in nontraditional jobs?
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| Larson |
Oh, yeah. My mother worked in a defense plant and we had a boarder during the war—a woman geologist who was doing some kind of work in the hills around San Jose. I thought she was very cool—wore army boots, etc. And I really wanted to become a lady Marine, even though I’m not sure they had any then. But it does show what girls were thinking during those years. And don’t forget Nancy Drew!
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| Kilgannon |
Ah, yes! The ever intrepid and endlessly resourceful Nancy! You saw quite a few different models. You had all this mixture going on?
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| Larson |
So when they told women to go back, they went back to the kitchen. But they didn’t necessarily go willingly or happily.
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| Nisbet |
Or stay there.
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| Larson |
Or stay there. As I think about it, growing up as I did really made me ripe for the feminist movement. My mother was a very strong woman, married to a very strong man. She was a coal miner’s daughter—grew up in a tough environment and learned from an early age to stand up for herself. She worked part-time before and after the war as a beauty operator. But her family came first—talk about unconditional love! She didn’t have great schooling, only got as far as the ninth grade, but was always taking classes and reading and ended up exceptionally well educated. She had always wanted to be a writer and began getting articles published while I was still at home, and kept at it so I now have inherited many boxes of her printed articles as well as several of her children’s books. So, with my father a radical political thinker—but a successful insurance man—and my very unusual mother, we lived a middle class existence without ever buying into a middle class mindset. And I have to say, I was always absolutely crazy about my mother, as were all my friends. She was an unbelievable role model.
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| Kilgannon |
So a much more complex picture. Historical generalizations can be too broad-brush. And thinking of Nancy Drew and the role of reading in girls’ formation, and your mother writing, what role did reading have in your own development? Did you read Betty Friedan and the early Ms. magazine, and that sort of thing?
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| Larson |
Well, I’ll tell you. Yes, we read all of those.
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| Nisbet |
And Gloria Steinem.
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| Kilgannon |
Did that give you another kind of ah-ha moment?
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| Larson |
Oh, my goodness, yes.
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| Nisbet |
Ms. magazine was–
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| Larson |
Ms. magazine was wonderful. And all of these things that were going on, too. Billie Jean King.
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| Kilgannon |
Oh, yes, right. The tennis champion.
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| Larson |
Oh, her match with, what was that guy’s name? Bobby Riggs. Anyway, I can remember sitting in our living room here, a big bunch of us sitting here rooting. I mean, it was like it was just a–
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| Kilgannon |
It had been pitched as “the battle of the sexes.”
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| Larson |
Oh, it was. It was.
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| Nisbet |
It was amazing.
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| Larson |
It was so thrilling. I can’t tell you how thrilling that was. Anyway, so there were all kinds of things. Oh, yes. And new books coming out all the time. When we get to talking about our work here, when we first started doing this research for this program, there was practically nothing out there in the way of anthologies and so forth of women’s work.
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| Kilgannon |
You were there at the very beginning?
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| Larson |
But then there was this blossoming of writing. And yes, it was a very fertile era, an era of intellectual stimulation, and what was going on in the consciousness raising groups as we were all throwing around these ideas. And anything would go in; you could say anything.
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| Kilgannon |
That was the idea, wasn’t it?
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| Nisbet |
Yes, it was amazing.
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| Larson |
And all kinds of crazy ideas. And nobody judged it. It was just the time to be, to think wild and crazy, and get it out there. And argue, lots of arguing. Lots of taking sides and everything.
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| Nisbet |
Different views, very different viewpoints. It’s not as though we sort of all came together and were alike. Again, I don’t know, I don’t like the picture I’m portraying of myself, but I can remember saying in college—by gosh, I was new in college—and I can remember telling somebody that oh, yes, I had some good women friends, but my really good friends were men, because they were just sort of more interesting. I can’t believe that! And nothing against men, but that I just wrote off, in a way, that kind of relationship with women at the time. Even though I had many good women friends. But it was this kind of hierarchy that I bought into.
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| Nisbet |
That was very common.
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| Nisbet |
Which really did change.
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| Kilgannon |
It’s exciting to think about all these things, the ferment of that era. So let’s see. You both came to Olympia in 1971. What was Olympia like? You’d come from much bigger places, and much more cosmopolitan areas.
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| Larson |
Well, we arrived here, and both of us were thinking, once again, we followed our husbands. And I already had this consciousness. But nevertheless, what are you going to do? Sandie arrived without the same consciousness I had.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, yeah.
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| Larson |
She was dragged up here. She didn’t want to leave Los Angeles. Anyway–
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| Kilgannon |
So was Olympia the end of the earth?
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| Larson |
Yeah.
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| Kilgannon |
Again. Except not quite as remote as Polynesia.
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| Larson |
Not as remote as Polynesia. But I mean, small. It was small. I didn’t feel quite as abandoned from the rest of the world as Sandie did, because my family was here, and I was really close to my family. My father and mother had moved up and lived with my aunt out on an island here. So I was not feeling that same thing that Sandie was feeling. But on the other hand, we’re both sitting here staring at each other and saying, “What are we going to do in this little town? What are we going to do? We’re going to be bored, bored, bored! We’ve got to find something.”
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| Nisbet |
Yeah. And also, I realized, too, the ethnocentricity that I, having been in California—in Southern California—I’m probably the only person you’ll talk to who, I just thought L.A. was such crazy, wonderful fun. But just what could be happening north of California?
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| Larson |
Right! [laughs]
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| Nisbet |
I mean, talk about ethnocentricity and provinciality, that was. Actually, my husband said—he had been teaching at UCLA—and he really wanted to leave LA. And we did have a choice. We could have gone to American University in DC, or Olympia, Washington. Well, probably if we didn’t have children, we might have said DC. But Pat and Eric were up here, and it was a brand new college, and that was a draw. But we made the best of things.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, you came here as wives.
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| Nisbet |
We came here as wives. And there was a Raquel Welch movie playing in the one theater in town. I really said, “Well, whatever we’re doing up there, let’s move in close to town, and not near the water.” I later came to love it. But then we drove way out to Sunrise Beach Road, and we lived on the water, and I thought I was going to—
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| Kilgannon |
That’s what, ten, fifteen miles outside of town?
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| Nisbet |
It’s ten miles. I was sure all my children were going to drown within the first week. So there was that kind of adjustment. I came, it was a wonderful move. I loved being up here. But it was that initial–
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| Larson |
But the college wasn’t open. I mean, basically this was the first year of the college. Inventing a new institution. And it was an exciting time for our husbands. They were inventing the college.
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| Kilgannon |
Except you had no role in that.
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| Larson |
And so we didn’t have a role. But so then, that very first year, they were having a teach-in at Evergreen. And another faculty wife, Michelle, Mickey–
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| Nisbet |
Michelle Pailthorp. Mickey Pailthorp.
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| Larson |
–was putting it on; I don’t know what her role was, but anyway, she was putting it together. And all of us were sort of in the same boat. All of us were in the same boat.
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| Kilgannon |
Did you have any kind of sort of club with each other?
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| Larson |
Not a club, but it was a–
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| Nisbet |
We got to know each other. Socializing.
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| Larson |
Yeah, there was lots of socializing. Because there was nothing else in the town.
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| Kilgannon |
You would have come here somewhat isolated from the town.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah. Yeah.
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| Larson |
But not each other.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah.
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| Larson |
So Mickey says, “Okay, we’ve got to fill up this whole day,” or two days or three, I can’t remember how long it was. “We’ve got to fill this up. We’ve got to fill every hour. You guys take one hour and I don’t care what you do, something theatrical.” And that’s the kind of person Mickey was. Just, “You do this, you do that.”
So we said, “Oh, yeah, we could do that.” Then we got—then we said, “What have we done? What are we going to do?” So then that’s when we came up with our first program, which was Battle-axe, which was women and war. And it was an antiwar selection of readings that were totally—we didn’t pay a bit of attention to copyright or anything because it was just a local thing.
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| Kilgannon |
I want to interrupt one second. We’ve forgotten to introduce that you have children.
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| Larson |
Oh, right!
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| Nisbet |
We do.
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| Kilgannon |
So you have two by this time?
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| Larson |
By this time, basically my husband and I adopted our first child, Kris, after we came back from Tikopia. We didn’t have any kids when we were in Tikopia. And so we adopted her that year that he was finishing his PhD, writing his dissertation. Then we moved to Connecticut, where he had a job teaching at the University of Connecticut, and we adopted our second child back there, Neil. So I have a son, Neil, and a daughter, Kris. We have a daughter, Kris, who is a captain in the L.A. City Fire Department. Nontraditional role for a lady. And she loves it. She’s crazy about it. She became a serious athlete. It was clear she was destined to be an athlete, because of her wonderful coordination and build. She went through UCLA on a full athletic scholarship. And our son, Neil, is now an attorney in Atlanta.
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| Kilgannon |
The other end of the country.
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| Larson |
Other end of the country. And I’ve always felt, I never felt as isolated here as Sandie did because of my family. My father’s family originally came from here, so he had moved back here. My brother moved here, they all lived here. So this is–
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| Kilgannon |
You had roots?
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| Larson |
I have some roots here, yeah.
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| Kilgannon |
And what about you, Sandie?
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| Nisbet |
Well actually, speaking, I really feel that we have made roots here in Olympia now.
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| Kilgannon |
It takes time, though.
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| Nisbet |
But I did. When I left California, I left my four siblings and my father; we’re going to be celebrating his one hundredth birthday in a couple of months. But now, two out of three of our children are up here. We have our eldest son, Garth, who lives in Portland. And he manages portfolios in the financial world.
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| Kilgannon |
That sounds important. [laughs]
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| Nisbet |
He’s, oh, he’s just a wonderful guy. And he and his wife Mary have four children. And our daughter Meara Clark and her husband Brad live in West Seattle. And she worked professionally quite a while before she got married. She was a lobbyist and etcetera , etcetera. And now she’s focusing on these two little boys, our other two grandchildren. And our youngest son, Evan, lives in Los Angeles. And he teaches at a very low-income elementary school in Los Angeles.
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| Kilgannon |
Challenging.
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| Nisbet |
Very challenging school. It’s great to grow up and really know you’d love these people even if they weren’t your kids. But I think we all were just lucky to have really terrific children, despite all the ups and downs you have as a family. They’ve been very influential to us in terms of just being supportive and loving and pains-in-the-butts now and then, but what would we ever do without them?
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| Kilgannon |
I just wanted to make sure we knew that while you began to do these things, that you did have quite young children. I wanted that in the backs of our minds, that you’re not just sort of striving out there all by yourself.
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| Nisbet |
While you’re at that point, Anne, I have to tell you one little story about Neil. Neil and my son Evan, when we were rehearsing in this living room, used to be running in and out with their friends now and then. And there was one day there was someone who asked “Oh, are your moms working?”
And they would say, “No. They’re just playing.” [laughter] “They’re just playing.” Because we would be acting out things, you know.
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| Larson |
It looked like play.
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| Nisbet |
They would roll their eyes.
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| Kilgannon |
“My mom doesn’t work.”
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| Nisbet |
She just plays.
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| Larson |
Well, but the other funny thing, since you brought that up, is Evergreen. We never knew if Evergreen was going to make it.
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| Kilgannon |
That’s true. The school as an institution went through ups and downs.
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| Larson |
And there was a lot of prejudice against the school when we first were here, to the point that I remember this funny story. My kids, I think it was…I can’t remember if it was Kris or Neil. Anyway, maybe back in third grade, a young grade in there, Neil came home. And I said, “What did you do in school today?” The usual thing, this is at the beginning of school.
He said, “Well, today they asked what our parents did.”
And I said, “Oh? What did you say?”
And he said, “Well, I said, ‘Well, my mother is an actress.’” He wouldn’t mention the fact that their father taught at Evergreen. And I thought that was very, very interesting. Because most people would think oh, my father is a college professor. You know, that would be a good thing.
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| Kilgannon |
That would be a feather in your cap, right? Not in this community?
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| Larson |
They did not want anybody to know their father had any connection with that crazy college.
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| Kilgannon |
It’s interesting that they already knew that that was a conflict.
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| Larson |
Oh, well, I’m sure. Yes, I’m sure that’s what they heard, “Evergreen.”
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| Nisbet |
“No grades.”
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| Larson |
“Greener” All this stuff, anyway.
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| Nisbet |
It was a very conservative town, when you think about it. I mean, I don’t think about Olympia in those terms anymore. But it was a very conservative little town.
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| Larson |
Olympia has changed with the coming of Evergreen.
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| Nisbet |
We were in a rural area, and the principal of the school out there, among other things, said, staring at us, “You’re kidding me!” Because there’s my husband and me and our three children. She said, “Oh, you’re just so fun! You all have Beatles haircuts!” Because the boys’ hair was a little long. “You all have these same Beatles haircuts!” And I thought, “Oh, what have we done?” [laughter]
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| Kilgannon |
Perhaps only people who live in Olympia would understand what that means. How small it is, and the place of Evergreen in this community. And how much, of course, it’s changed over time. Not completely, but certainly when Evergreen first came here, it was a really big change and a big experiment for everyone, whether or not that would work out here.
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| Nisbet |
It was dangerous to start a progressive, different kind of college in the capital of a state, for one thing. Legislators from all over the state.
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| Kilgannon |
Not everybody was happy with that.
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| Nisbet |
No. But it turned out, I think, to be absolutely a boon to this place.
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| Kilgannon |
I can’t imagine Olympia without Evergreen now.
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| Nisbet |
I can’t imagine Olympia without Evergreen, either.
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| Kilgannon |
So here you were, you’re the faculty wives. You go, you participate in this—I think we’d call a symposium.
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| Larson |
It was called a teach-in. That’s what they were doing then.
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| Kilgannon |
Was it mostly anti war-oriented?
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| Larson |
It was all war-oriented. Anti-Vietnam War teach-in. They were having them all over the college campuses.
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| Kilgannon |
But how did you happen to take a women’s topic to deal with that?
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| Larson |
I was a raving feminist when I arrived in this town. And Sandie was kind of dragged into it. I mean, I really couldn’t think of anything else, except the war and women. So what were we going to do? We were asked to fill up… We were going to do something on women. Sandie just had to do it. [laughs]
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| Nisbet |
Well, I was very, very active with the antiwar business, too.
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| Larson |
She was very quick. She didn’t take much convincing.
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| Nisbet |
No.
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| Kilgannon |
And where did you find your material?
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| Nisbet |
Let’s see, this was ’72, and the Vietnam War ended–
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| Larson |
Well, this is still, remember, it was Cambodia. I think this had to do with the bombing of Cambodia–
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| Nisbet |
Yeah, I think it did. Yes.
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| Larson |
I think it had to do with the Cambodia thing. I knew exactly what was going on–
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| Kilgannon |
That’s about right. There was kind of a national explosion when people discovered that the war had escalated.
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| Larson |
Went over the border.
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| Nisbet |
Right. I think that’s what was going on. One thing that strikes me about that Battle-axe, which we put together, which was really about women and war. When we were trying to figure out what to call it, Pat’s father came up with it, do you remember that? Your dad came up with that title, Battle-axe.
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| Kilgannon |
Most of your titles for programs are always very gritty and fairly eye-catching.
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| Nisbet |
That’s good. We always had fun with that. Yeah.
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| Kilgannon |
They have some wit and humor in them.
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| Larson |
I mean, we can’t look at the world without humor. I don’t think we’ve ever done anything that didn’t have some humor. [Pat leaves room for a moment]
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| Nisbet |
No. No. I think that what happens when you look at a program like this, it looks like we just kind of put this together. But Pat and I spent so much time initially, working on getting the same vision of what we wanted to do. And that takes a lot of working it through. Because when you’re doing something in theater like this, you have to have the same idea—of the ideas you want to put out there, and also of the entertainment value or the theatrical value. So a lot of our time, even with that first show, Battle-axe, I can remember us working really hard before we even decided, finally, what we were going to do. And that’s that background stuff that people just don’t realize.
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| Kilgannon |
Once you’re performing, it looks effortless.
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| Nisbet |
But that’s what we did a lot of. And early on, it was this idea that we weren’t too worried with this first one about copyright. But still, the idea of historical material in terms of theater and the audience will listen and open their hearts more to something that was a hundred years ago. But if at the moment you’re doing Battle-axe and you talk about Kissinger or someone who was current, then right again, right away you get hackles up; it’s too close. It closes off the real listening. So very early on, we decided that was the way to go, and how much the history parallels what it is today, there’s nothing that we want to say that hasn’t already been said a hundred years ago. So part of, I think, Pat, the whole thing about theater is you want your audience to pay attention and really listen. And let them figure out, “Huh, that was a hundred years ago, but wow, it seems to still hold.” That was one thing, the historical stuff.
And then, the other thing is, we knew that, as a matter of fact, all the way through this, that we were dealing with a very touchy, very sensitive topic. And so you keep it remote in terms of what people are saying. But also, there has to be humor in it. There has to be some relief. Because you can’t sit there for an hour and have it be all tragic. So that was another thing we figured out really early. There has to be humor, there has to be an idea. In readers’ theater, you’re holding books like this, we memorized those books. We did that show once when I’d misplaced our scripts and we knew the pieces. But if you hold the book, you’re always reminding the audience, “Don’t get too emotionally involved with me or the character. Think about these ideas.”
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| Kilgannon |
The text.
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| Nisbet |
Think about the idea. So those, I think, are three kind of substantial strategies that we used to deal with theater. And also with our work as a political statement.
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| Kilgannon |
So I’m thinking, as you’re saying that, you gave the audience a role, too, where they make the connection.
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| Nisbet |
That’s right. [Pat returns]
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| Kilgannon |
You don’t shove it down their throats. When they make the connection, they’re processing your piece–
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| Larson |
And they’re working.
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| Kilgannon |
–in a different way. But there’s a feeling, I know, when you’re watching a movie and you feel clever because you’re figuring out whodunit, it gives you something as the audience.
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| Nisbet |
That’s right.
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| Kilgannon |
Where you’re experiencing, “Oh, I can see what is happening, I can see this.”
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| Nisbet |
Yeah. That’s exactly it.
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| Kilgannon |
And it gives the audience a good feeling, to figure it out.
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| Nisbet |
That’s right.
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| Kilgannon |
And you’re right. There were all these historical parallels.
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| Nisbet |
Major parallels. All the way back to the Greeks. We used Greek theater.
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| Kilgannon |
Did it seem like you were telling the same story over and over, with different characters?
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| Nisbet |
In a way. In a way. But we also analyzed—each piece we did, we would write out what the idea is. So that even though they were all connected, the ideas were different. Each idea. Just trying to layer, make it rich and not repetitive, the same, yeah, right.
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| Kilgannon |
Holding up mirrors in different ways?
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| Nisbet |
I think that’s a good way of putting it. Holding up mirrors in different ways. I don’t have the Battle-axe program right here in front of me. I wish I did. But we did even a funny little poem about war. I mean, we tried to find some lightness.
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| Kilgannon |
So you hit the library, and just looked for everything you could find?
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| Nisbet |
And as Pat mentioned, there was practically nothing on this. But the State Library here was just wonderful. And up there on the fourth, fifth floor, we figured there was some librarian who anticipated us coming there. Because there were all so many pieces by Anonymous—they were often women. And in the Battle-axe, as I remember, also there were early plays that we could take scenes from that really worked. Iphigenia, talking about the sacrifice—mothers talking about the sacrifice of—in those days—sons. Or the idea of politicians versus the people who are actually going out there. There was a lot of variety, I think, in all of these shows.
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| Kilgannon |
I know that in some of your performances, you’re not funny all the time. You have some piece that’s kind of serious and a little heart wrenching, and then something more humorous, more ironic. And you balanced it out throughout the performances that I watched. I imagine that was deliberate.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, yes.
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| Kilgannon |
The pace, the emotions. Build them and then bring them somewhere. Was that the idea?
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| Nisbet |
Exactly. I would say that one thing one does when you’re working on a theatrical performance that also has a substantial political base is you are anticipating the audience. You don’t have theater without an audience. So you also figure out, what is it you want them to see? It’s very manipulative when you think of it that way. But it’s what we do with this kind of a political base. So you might want to take an audience just so far and have them feel moved, but you don’t want to get them into the depths of despair so they’re going to turn you off. So there’s always a balance.
And I think with Battle-axe, that was heavy from the get-go. But, oh, here’s this, it was a wonderful show. But Virginia Woolf, we start with Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas. She’s so analytical, and talks about what would you do if you had these three guineas? We go back to Lysistrata, which is hilarious. You know, just “no more sex for the men until they stop this craziness.” And oh, then, the Frog and the Fishwife and the Soldier was kind of–
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| Larson |
Just a poem.
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| Nisbet |
–was just a poem. And then, of course, Daniel Berrigan, The Trial of the Catonsville Nine. We took an Arthur Miller play and a Robert Sherwood play.
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| Nisbet |
But these were all things that we were familiar with because of our background. Except for the Virginia Woolf thing. It’s just that we, if you look at it–
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| Kilgannon |
As drama majors?
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| Larson |
We would know this. So basically, so this is an easy program for us to put together.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah. Yeah.
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| Larson |
But the idea that we approached this was—as theater people—was that you don’t lecture people. What you do is you present some kind of an emotionally engaging scene or story or whatever it is, and they make their own conclusions. And that’s how you engage an audience, is they have to work just as hard as you’re working. And in order to really make some kind of an impact on them, they have to do that work. So basically, you don’t want to tell them everything.
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| Nisbet |
Right.
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| Larson |
You want to put things out there that are going to make them automatically come to the same conclusions you want them to. Maybe or maybe not exactly what you want, but that you’re putting things out there that you know are going to make them work to think about particular things. And if they don’t do the work, they’re going to go to sleep. That’s basically what you do in theater: you keep them awake; you keep them involved; you keep them thinking.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, it’s very dynamic. Not like writing, where you just send it out into the world and kind of cross your fingers. But the audience, they’re right in front of you. Who did you anticipate your audience would be?
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| Nisbet |
Excuse me, just before, I just want to finish up with what Pat said here. I think an example of emotional internalizing is when you look back at the Greeks with Lysistrata, with Aristophanes, the women are getting together, Pat was talking about this consciousness raising group, and that was exactly what it was. We had great fun with that, actually, the Lysistrata thing. “By gosh, this is what we’re going to do. We’re not going to have sex, and then the compliant one will say, “Oh, maybe just once in a while. Maybe just now and then.” And also this different viewpoint from these women, and then likewise with Iphigenia in Euripides. Clytemnestra pleading with her husband to not sacrifice their daughter. And him explaining why they had to sacrifice their daughter. And he didn’t want to, of course, but it had to be done. So those, I think, were examples of where the audience has to say, “My God, that was written how many hundreds of years ago, and yet–”
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| Kilgannon |
Yet it’s reaching me now?
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| Nisbet |
“We’re still…”
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| Larson |
Same thing.
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| Nisbet |
These two viewpoints are still there, and the same sacrifice is still there. I think that’s an example of what we’re talking about.
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| Larson |
But anyway, this was an easy—this was easy. We knew all the stuff.
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| Kilgannon |
Also, because it was your community, you were playing to whom?
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| Larson |
We knew, yeah, we knew who the audience was going to be, and so forth.
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| Kilgannon |
And they were, what? Students? Or–
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| Nisbet |
And faculty.
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| Larson |
And faculty. And a few townspeople.
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| Kilgannon |
The Evergreen community.
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| Nisbet |
Yes.
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| Larson |
And a few townspeople. It would be advertised. But basically, what you did in a teach-in is you took over the school. You cancelled classes. And instead, you had every hour of the regular school day devoted to something that was thought provoking or was–
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| Kilgannon |
Addressed the issues?
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| Larson |
–or educational or addressed the issues in some way. But this was easy, because this was all stuff we basically had read and studied and knew.
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| Nisbet |
And it could have been twice as long, three times as long–
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| Kilgannon |
But it was just you two?
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| Larson |
Yeah, just us two.
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| Kilgannon |
And you were basically—as I understand it, readers’ theater is pretty plain. You’re just onstage; you have almost no props, maybe even none.
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| Larson |
No props. You have costuming that doesn’t draw attention to itself. And basically, the reason you have readers’ theater as opposed to having memorized the scenes and so forth is to remind the audience—you’re putting a step between the emotional involvement—you remind them that, in fact, these are words that somebody else spoke. You get into these theories of things about aesthetic distance and so forth. The Bertolt Brecht theory about how you need to have some aesthetic distance. If an audience becomes too engaged, they stop thinking. If you really want them to think, you have a little bit of distance. You get them engaged and then you break it, and then you get them engaged, and you break it again. Anyway, so the idea of readers’ theater is to keep that kind of constant reminder that in fact these—this is a little reminder–
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| Nisbet |
These are ideas.
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| Kilgannon |
The reminder of the richness of all that language and text that all these writers have allowed you to use, masses of different writers. If you had done only one play, that’s one voice.
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| Nisbet |
Right.
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| Kilgannon |
But if you did some of your programs where you bring in ten, fifteen writers, and you just keep hitting people at different angles with all these different voices, was that part of it? Where you have multiple voices.
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| Larson |
Right.
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| Nisbet |
Now, for this show, for this first show, we just wore black and we didn’t have any props and hats, which we inserted later with the other shows. It was just pretty–
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| Larson |
We didn’t have any props and hats with anything till we got to Curtain Call Grandmother.
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| Nisbet |
Didn’t we have any hats? [laughter]
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| Larson |
It seemed that way.
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| Nisbet |
She’s absolutely right. We didn’t have any hats.
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| Larson |
No, nothing.
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| Nisbet |
You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. We had different costumes.
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| Larson |
We had different costumes.
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| Nisbet |
We did have different costumes.
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| Larson |
We got the plain black– So then, basically, you’re onstage, with this first show, we were onstage with black skirts and tops. And then we had our books. And this is—just because it’s readers’ theater doesn’t mean you just stand there and read. That’s one way of doing it. That is one way. But that isn’t what we did. Basically, we had a script, and then we would maybe put the script down. For instance, when we did the Lysistrata, when we did those dramas where we interacted, we didn’t have a script in our hand. We started off with a script, and then we put the script down.
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| Nisbet |
Acted, performed it.
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| Nisbet |
So we would walk around on the stage. We would sit, stand on a chair, do different kinds of things like that.
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| Nisbet |
I think this time, just reading how we described Battle-axe, the first one we did, women and war, what we wrote was “This was about women’s traditional role to plead for peace and to lament the dead. Men’s role is to indulge her compassion and to reject her vision.”
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| Larson |
It’s pretty succinct. Anyway, so that was the easy one. So then, it just so happened that Gisela Taber was in the audience and saw this production.
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| Kilgannon |
Explain who she was at that point.
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| Larson |
Gisela Taber was, at that point in time, the governor’s, what was her title? Anyway, she was head of the governor’s commission on women. I don’t know what the title was.
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| Kilgannon |
Not the commission. The Women’s Council.
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| Larson |
That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know.
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| Kilgannon |
There were several different bodies, I’m just trying to be careful here. Gisela Taber, by 1971, was Governor Dan Evans appointee, at that point, to head the Women’s Council.
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| Larson |
Right.
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| Kilgannon |
At any rate, she was a person who could make things happen.
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| Nisbet |
Yes.
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| Larson |
So she happened to see this, she attended that performance. So she came up to us afterwards and said, “You know, that is very effective. That’s just a very effective way of dealing with ideas. Would you consider putting together a program to take around the state to initiate discussions on the equal rights amendment?” Now she didn’t say to support the ERA, to “initiate discussions on the equal rights amendment.”
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| Kilgannon |
She’s not supposed to be a lobbyist. But just provide information.
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| Larson |
That’s right. So she said, so basically, that did fit. Could you put ideas out, and you have a discussion afterwards. So we said, “Yeah, that sounds like it would be something really fun.”
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| Kilgannon |
People were already involved in the campaign?
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| Nisbet |
Mickey Pailthorp was involved, too, in that thing.
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| Larson |
Oh, yes. Oh, yeah.
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| Kilgannon |
If not then, soon she was working in Seattle, heading the statewide campaign office for the ERA.
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| Larson |
So anyway, so we said, “Oh, sure! We’ll be happy to do that. That sounds like fun.” Then, because all of my—I’m in theater, but I probably like history as much or more than theater. So anyway, I had been, by that time, aware of the fact that there had been a lot of the same arguments used against the equal rights amendment that had been used in the suffrage movement. So we sort of got that as an idea. Let’s go back and look at some of this information, not realizing how hard it was going to be to find, because they did not have a lot of anthologies then.
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| Kilgannon |
Women’s history was just beginning as a study.
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| Larson |
Just beginning. And so anyway, we started down that road, and we got about, into it, and we had a date for the first performance.
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| Kilgannon |
How much time did you have?
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| Nisbet |
Five months, about. It looks like, if we did this in April, and then August, four or five months. And we thought, oh, there was nothing to it.
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| Larson |
I’m saying this is April because I’m just guessing. I think it was the spring. But anyway, so yeah, we had four or five months. Maybe four months.
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| Kilgannon |
Not really a long piece of time.
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| Larson |
And we didn’t know what we were doing. There was no–
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| Kilgannon |
So she kind of just gave you this as a vague idea?
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| Larson |
Yeah. We said, “Oh, sure. Won’t that be fun!” So we call Mickey up about a month before we were supposed to do this show.
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| Nisbet |
Maybe a week.
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| Kilgannon |
Was this an actual engagement?
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| Larson |
Yeah.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah.
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| Larson |
It was a Bellevue thing. Oh, yeah, something going on up there.
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| Kilgannon |
So you had a deadline.
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| Larson |
So we had a deadline. And so we were just up, I can remember, in my upstairs room, you know, we’re sitting there and we’re saying, “We can’t do this.”
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| Nisbet |
It’s so hard.
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| Larson |
It’s not going to happen. We cannot possibly do this. So Sandie says, “Well, call Mickey and tell her we can’t do it.”
So I call Mickey, and I say, “Mickey, we just are not going to be able to do this. It’s not going to happen. It’s just too hard and we’re just having too much trouble.”
And she says, “Bullshit!” And she hangs up the phone. [laughter]
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| Nisbet |
That was it.
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| Larson |
So Sandie says, “What did she say?” You couldn’t hear that.
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| Nisbet |
No, no.
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| Larson |
I said, “She said bullshit.” So there we were. So, anyway. That was Mickey. God, she was a funny woman.
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| Kilgannon |
Oh, that was clarifying!
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| Nisbet |
Yeah, she really—we had no choice. We wanted to do it, and we thought it was important to do it. And we ended up doing it, I remember, I think my sister was underneath the table with a tape recorder.
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| Larson |
Because we didn’t have musicians. We had music between the pieces.
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| Nisbet |
But I think, as I look back, Pat, and correct me if I’m wrong, but part of the thing is, we started finding all this really amazing historical material about why women shouldn’t get the vote, which was very parallel to why the ERA should go down. And I don’t know, I have to speak for myself. I think we were both so passionate about the feeling about it, and wanting it to work. But it didn’t seem, as I remember, it didn’t initially seem entertaining. It seemed so—even though we were putting funny things in–
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| Kilgannon |
Not enough theatrical value?
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| Nisbet |
As I remember. And we didn’t have music at that time, did we?
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| Larson |
No!
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| Nisbet |
We had no music, which really made a difference later, when Denise Livingston joined us.
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| Kilgannon |
Was it hard to make transitions between the materials?
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| Nisbet/td>
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Right. Exactly.
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| Larson |
So that’s why we had this, we had a tape recorder. I can’t remember what kind of music we were using. And Sandie’s sister, as I say, was underneath the piano. Turning it on, because it was in a big mansion in Bellevue.
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| Kilgannon |
What was the venue?
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| Larson |
I call it a benefit. I’m not sure it was a benefit.
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| Nisbet |
It was in someone’s mansion, somebody’s beautiful home, yeah. You know what? Was it that for, was that for the Women’s Law Center?
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| Larson |
No.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, at any rate, a little bit out of your comfort zone, perhaps.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah, I think–
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| Larson |
It was a huge living room, I mean, it was a big mansion. It was one of these big houses. And I got there late. I was lost.
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| Nisbet |
And it was men and women.
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| Larson |
Men and women, yeah. Most of these were men and women.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah.
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| Larson |
And anyway, we finally came up with basically this show here, which at that point we called Enter Laughing. We didn’t change this too much.
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| Nisbet |
And then it became Give Them an Inch.
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| Larson |
Give Them an Inch. And so we did maybe that one. And then, when did we get Denise? I think right away after that.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah.
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| Kilgannon |
I want to step back for a second. How did you come up with that great title, Enter Laughing?
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| Nisbet |
I don’t know.
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| Larson |
Because the very first scene–
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| Kilgannon |
That just breaks all the stereotypes right there: feminists are serious, but not very funny.
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| Nisbet |
That’s what we wanted to do.
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| Larson |
And this actually tied in with the very first piece, which is a Moliere comedy.
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| Nisbet |
The thing that was fun about this as I remember, Pat, is that this was—I can’t remember the character’s name, but he is describing what a woman should be.
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| Larson |
A wife. A wife.
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| Nisbet |
What a wife should do. All the things– And so we did not change—all respect to Moliere—we did not change the dialog very much. But we gave the dialog to, instead of the old guy who was looking for this new wife, we gave it to, like his maid–
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| Larson |
No. The woman that he was–the play, actually, is that he, the male proposes to this young girl. I can’t remember if it’s Agnes or Beatrice. I think it was Agnes. Or Beatrice. Anyway, he proposes to this young girl. And in the process of proposing to her, he lays out all of the rules that you have to follow to be a wife. And of course, that’s the whole point of Moliere is this ridiculous old man is proposing to this woman by laying out these very strict rules and making it sound like marriage is going to be awful. So we have her say, “Still on his knees to me, he says.” And it’s two women talking.
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| Kilgannon |
Ah, she’s relating it to a friend?
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| Larson |
She says, “Still on his knees to me. He says, ‘Marriage, Agnes, is no joke.’”
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| Nisbet |
Joke. Right.
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| Larson |
I think that’s the first line.
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| Nisbet |
And that was written in 1662. So there you think, ha, that was a while ago.
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| Larson |
And I have to tell you a funny anecdote about that particular scene.
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| Kilgannon |
Yes, please.
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| Larson |
We had a woman come up afterwards very early. This is over in Wenatchee, I have to think, correct me if I’m wrong here, Sandie. But we had someone come up to us afterwards and say, “Oh, I loved your show. But you know, I don’t think you should do that, I don’t think you should do that first scene anymore.”
And we said, “Why?”
She said, “Well, they don’t know we do that.” [laughter] “Men don’t know that we make so much fun of them.”
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| Kilgannon |
You were letting out a trade secret? That’s so funny.
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| Larson |
Oh my gosh! She was serious.
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| Nisbet |
We do that.
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| Nisbet |
Okay, so anyway, we got Denise after that.
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| Kilgannon |
You noticed that you needed something?
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| Larson |
I mean, we didn’t know what we were going to do, where we were going to go with this thing.
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| Kilgannon |
So when you signed on, Gisela had asked you to do this, did you have any sense of how often you would perform or how much or how long?
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| Nisbet |
We didn’t know at the time.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, “let’s just try this out” kind of thing?
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| Larson |
Yeah. Yeah. So basically, and of course we kept saying, “We’re not ready, we’re not ready, we can’t do it.” And so by the time we got ready to do it, it was getting closer to the election. But after this first one, we decided, we got such a good response from them, we decided this really could work, but we needed to have it more entertaining, Sandie’s right. And we needed to have some music to tie it together and lighten it up.
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| Kilgannon |
So in 1972, when you’re doing this, this would be the state ERA. But you’ve still got time because then you immediately go into a campaign for the national ERA?
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| Larson |
Yeah.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah.
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| Larson |
But our initial idea, really, was that it was only going to be for the state ERA. And we really hadn’t thought about it being anything beyond the state ERA. But then, we really did get such a great response from it.
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| Kilgannon |
And you’d done all that work.
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| Larson |
And we’d done all the work, right. And so we thought, well, maybe there’s a life for this beyond the state. And because, part of the thing was, these venues for us to play in were arranged by committee. So we weren’t out there getting our bookings ourselves.
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| Kilgannon |
You didn’t have to go advertise yourself all over the place?
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| Larson |
Yes. So that was an important part of our making a decision to go on. If we thought we could find a way to get audiences for this. So when it was all over, we had such a good reaction that we thought, there really is a life for this beyond the state. And then we figured out how we might do it. And that is, we just had contacts at other universities. And this is very academically acceptable.
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| Kilgannon |
The heavy-hitter writers?
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| Larson |
Yeah. These were serious writers.
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| Kilgannon |
Let’s review: Moliere, La Fontaine–
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| Nisbet |
Seneca Falls.
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| Kilgannon |
Seneca Falls.
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| Larson |
The anti-suffrage stuff–
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| Kilgannon |
Things from Harper’s magazine in the 1850s and what not.
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| Larson |
Alice Duer Miller from 1915.
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| Kilgannon |
1918, Maude Younger. This “Working Girl of Boston” is from a report of the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics. This sounds like it would be quite a piece of work to make interesting. [laughs]
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| Larson |
No.
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| Nisbet |
It was. It actually ended up being pretty successful. It was just an article; it was a report, statistic report about– oh, is it–
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| Larson |
Tell me if I’m right, and tell me if I’m wrong. Basically, as my recollection was that what it was, was a series of interviews that were done in front of a commission of some kind. And this was a woman who–
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| Kilgannon |
Told a story?
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| Larson |
Told the story of her life.
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| Nisbet |
I have a little different recollection of it. I’m sure I remember it was kind of, more like straight data…a woman living in an attic, who lost her son. And I just remember putting it in the first person. I mean, I think I have a memory because it seemed so powerful. But you know, we also had other news bits with people telling their own story. I remember thinking, wow, all we did was take this survey poll, “I’m living in this attic,” and we just tweaked it. And that was kind of interesting. But what we could do with something as mundane as a newspaper article or a statistic, you just suddenly make it live. You make a monologue out of it.
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| Kilgannon |
Find a nugget in there?
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| Nisbet |
Yes. I think that’s how we did that.
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| Larson |
And then George Bernard Shaw.
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| Kilgannon |
Right.
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| Larson |
A Sojourner Truth speech. And Edgar Lee Masters.
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| Kilgannon |
Oscar Wilde. Let’s see.
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| Larson |
Yeah, Oscar Wilde.
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| Kilgannon |
Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Ibsen, of course. Abigail Scott Duniway, and Virginia Woolf, being the conclusion. All important.
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| Larson |
So basically what we did, then, was go to contacts we had at colleges. And this was a pattern, then, that we figured out in this first month after we did—in the first three months, two months—after we did the Washington State. We’d get a college, and the college had some budget to pay for us to get there. And then we would contact—through the college there would be some kind of a contact who could make a local contact with the women’s group. Or we had friends. We would say, “We’ll be there. Have you got anybody—could you get an audience together for us someplace?” And it was amazing how many–
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| Kilgannon |
I imagine word of mouth after that, because those people would know other people.
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| Nisbet |
Well, then we had, when did we have our agent, Pat? We started with Adrienne Alexander and we ended with Penny Hoffman. We had two women who acted as our agents to help us do this.
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| Larson |
See, but I want to show you how many bookings we got on the basis of that.
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| Kilgannon |
I think we should scan some of this into the record. Because it’s incredible.
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| Larson |
Yeah. Right.
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| Kilgannon |
I mean, you were everywhere!
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| Larson |
The election was over on November first. And then we put together a little local thing in Ellensburg and Olympia, some little local things. And then in January, we did some local things in the state. And then we went down to Oregon, and then we went down to California. And then–
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| Kilgannon |
And then it kicks off.
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| Nisbet |
We ended up doing at least thirty-five—we did thirty-five states, as I remember.
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| Larson |
Yeah, but I’m just talking about this first year. The first two months.
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| Kilgannon |
It grows and grows and grows.
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| Larson |
And the interesting thing I was thinking about, how in the world did we ever make this happen? And it really had to do with grassroots.
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| Nisbet |
It did. Absolutely.
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| Larson |
And that’s what impresses me about when I look back at this period, is what an incredible grassroots movement it was. Because all we had to do was contact a university where somebody would trust us. And we knew we had contacts at universities. Somebody would trust us. And we’d call and we’d say, “We’ve got a great program here. It’s been very popular here. We won’t embarrass you. You will not be sorry. You will not be sorry.” [laughs] And so they would, that would be how we would get a little corps going. And then–
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| Kilgannon |
By then, you would also have press releases you could send?
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| Larson |
We quickly put something together.
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| Nisbet |
And the other thing, we always insisted—I don’t think, I don’t remember an exception, Pat—we always insisted on a discussion period afterwards.
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| Kilgannon |
Yes, I want to hear about the format you used.
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| Nisbet |
That was part of it.
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| Kilgannon |
This is like fairly quick-moving. Isn’t this like forty-five minutes, or something like that?
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| Nisbet |
Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. So you’re hoping for emotional contact and some intellectual stimulation and ideas. And the work that we talked about with the audience saying, “This does make sense today.” And then the discussion period, open to questions. And eventually, after how many times we did this, we talked about how almost choreographed those discussions became. Because the questions that the audience would ask, they were just–
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| Kilgannon |
Universal?
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| Nisbet |
They were the same, universal, and we almost had—between the two of us—we’d each have stories that we would tell. And I remember at some point, I’m sure Pat came up with this, God, we were really choreographing this based on what the audience wanted. But it was pretty universal.
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| Kilgannon |
You knew which chords you were touching?
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| Nisbet |
Well, we had very different audiences. I mean, I was really nervous about going to Fort Lewis Army Base with primarily men.
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| Kilgannon |
Yes, I want to hear about some of the more unusual places. You were playing in women’s centers and what not. But then you also played these other much more difficult places for this sort of thing. So, tell me about Fort Lewis. How did you happen to be invited to go there, for starters?
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| Larson |
Well, it’s how we got invited to almost every place. And I think you said something earlier, it’s word of mouth. Basically, once we sort of got ourselves out there and got seen in a few places, there was—and this is what I mean by the grassroots. There would be a woman in the audience, or sometimes a man, even, in the audience, who would see us and say, “I’ve got to have you at such and such a place.” So you look down here and you can see that basically what we have is, we have high schools, we have community colleges, we have libraries, we have sororities. We have New York Life Insurance luncheon, Rotary Club, YWCA, YMCA–
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| Kilgannon |
There’s some kind of link?
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| Larson |
–a medical auxiliary, Unitarian Church. And all of these things. And basically what it is, is somebody would see us, and they would say, “I’ve got a group that’s got to see you.” So that’s what happened. And I’m sure that’s what happened at Fort Lewis. I don’t remember exactly who saw us, but it was a woman who arranged programs there. So she got us in. We went back several times. We didn’t just play there once.
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| Nisbet |
And the first one looks like we’d been into it for two years before we got into Fort Lewis.
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| Kilgannon |
So by then, you’re perhaps over your jitters of when you first started?
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| Larson |
Well, no. But I mean, still, that was out of the question because basically, this is not for officers. This is enlisted men. So we knew what that audience would be, and we thought, “I don’t know how they’re going to react to this.” But the truth of the matter is–
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| Nisbet |
They were wonderful.
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| Larson |
–they were wonderful.
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| Kilgannon |
Could you describe the room? What kind of place it was?
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| Larson |
Well, that was just sort of like a rec room. I mean, most of the places, we played in living rooms and we played in big theaters, and we played in rec rooms and luncheon rooms, universities.
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| Kilgannon |
I understand from some of your descriptions, though, that when you went to Fort Lewis, at first you were heckled by some people.
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| Larson |
No. We were not heckled at Fort Lewis.
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| Nisbet |
We had a heckler. We used a heckler in the program. One of the characters was a heckler.
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| Larson |
The only time we were heckled was very late in the whole thing, during that International Women’s Year thing. We performed at the national International Women’s Year Convention in Houston. They had set us up to play at a coffeehouse at the campus of Houston. In fact, I ran across a letter, I’ll put it in the file, from someone apologizing for having set us up at that venue. Because there were some real redneck characters. And it was a very, very unpleasant. It’s the only really unpleasant performance–
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| Kilgannon |
What did you do? How did you respond?
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| Larson |
Oh, we just got through it as quickly as we could. I mean, our program was not spontaneous. It was like a theatrical production. And you just couldn’t, you just didn’t stop and–
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| Kilgannon |
Deal with it?
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| Larson |
–deal with it. And the first time that it happened, it was very late in our careers. And I think we were kind of, we really didn’t know what to do. And we just basically wanted to get through it and get out of there as quickly as we could. That was the only time it happened. But I’ll tell you, the most nervous I think we ever were beforehand was the very first time we went off to the University of Utah.
|
| Nisbet |
Oh, yeah!
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| Kilgannon |
Not a friendly atmosphere?
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| Larson |
It was early on. It was the first time that we had been hired at a university that we did not know the person who had hired us. This is strictly—she’d heard about us and she wanted us to come. And so we’re getting on the airplane to go to this, we don’t know what. And as we’re getting on the plane, one of us buys a newspaper. And we open it up, and on the front page it says, an elder, or bishop, or whoever it is—head of the Mormon Church—says women’s liberation is the work of the devil. And here we’re on our way. So we’re thinking, “Oh my God, are we in for it! What did we say we would do this for? It’s going to be painful and awful, it’s going to be terrible.”
We got there, it was one of the most thrilling things we ever did.
|
| Nisbet |
It was incredible.
|
| Larson |
It was so wonderful.
|
| Nisbet |
Packed places, whatever it was.
|
| Larson |
Packed with women with incredible stories.
|
| Nisbet |
And some of them had kind of sneaked away, as I remember, to do this. But they’re very, just strong. And recognizing, I mean, certainly the fervor of the women’s movement was in Utah. And these women were–
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| Kilgannon |
It was high stakes for them, though?
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| Larson |
It was very high stakes. And some of them paid a big price for it. Because this is a time when they were feeling like they could talk about these things. And they were making waves, and it wasn’t, maybe a couple years after that that they really got clamped down on. And some of those women that had stood up there in the front really paid.
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| Nisbet |
And I remember, I know it was in Utah that someone came up, in one of these programs that we did, Nora, from The Doll’s House, where she leaves her husband and her kids and says, “I’ve got to go get myself together.”
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| Kilgannon |
Find myself?
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| Nisbet |
Yeah. And we had a woman afterwards and say, “My God, I feel that way.”
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| Kilgannon |
Oh, dear.
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| Nisbet |
I can remember, “I feel just that way,” and what do you do?
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| Kilgannon |
You worry a little bit about the trail that you’re leaving? [laughs]
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| Nisbet |
But it’s also, I don’t think we ever worried about it, because it was an awakening thing, whatever one does with it, you can’t go back to that same feeling that you’d had before.
And there was another kind of reaction we had. I can’t remember exactly what I was going to say, but I do remember that it was in Utah that someone came up and was just so emotional about Nora.
Oh, and then there was another place, was it Utah, Pat? Where a woman came up and said, “I got in the wrong room!” [laughter] I remember she was looking for an art class or something. She said, “I’m taking water coloring. I can’t believe this!” And was so excited about this.
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| Kilgannon |
She wasn’t at all prepared for this! [laughs] Oh my!
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| Nisbet |
And we were too exhausted at the end of the day to keep journals. But when I look back on this and we start remembering, it was so often those individual stories, and those emotional responses. And for men, too, you know. I think Pat’s right. I’m so quick to block out things. I do remember that Houston gig. And remember thinking at the time, well, you know, we’ve been at this for ages and at least this is the first time, it’s the only time–
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| Kilgannon |
It’s actually pretty amazing to see how inflammatory some of the material was.
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| Nisbet |
Yes. But so often I think, without failure, the place would get quiet during one or another of the shows. And you knew people were listening. And I would say ninety percent of the audience would stay for the discussion. I mean, they just sat still.
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| Larson |
People did stay for the discussions. But I don’t know, did you talk about our idea about how we looked, the costumes, and so forth?
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| Kilgannon |
No.
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| Larson |
The imagery part. So really—and I think Sandie sort of mentioned this briefly early on—and that is, in the process of putting each program together, we’d spend an awful lot of time just brainstorming. We’d do a massive research. I can’t believe the amount of research we did. And then we would say, “Okay, what point do we want to make out of this?” Because this is what you do in any play. You have a main point, and then you have a bunch of small points. But you have a main point. What is your main point?
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| Kilgannon |
Your message?
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| Larson |
Well, it isn’t even a message.
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| Nisbet |
Or the point of the piece.
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| Kilgannon |
What experience should these people get? Or something like that?
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| Larson |
There’s a philosophical underpinning. And since we were both engaged in this, we had to have an underpinning that we both agreed on. So there was lots of discussion after we did this. And we would brainstorm and write down these things. And I found the notes we did for Fun and Games. Fun and Games is the most touchy.
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| Nisbet |
That was one of the most sensitive ones.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, that’s everybody’s at-home experience.
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| Larson |
So we did an awful lot of brainstorming and figuring out what our idea about marriage was.
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| Kilgannon |
So when you’re brainstorming, and you go and do a program, were there things that you thought, say, after a performance, “Hmm, that one didn’t work, let’s put something else there, or let’s rearrange this.”
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| Nisbet |
We did some of that, yeah.
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| Kilgannon |
This isn’t static. This is, I imagine, a bit fluid?
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| Larson |
A little bit. Not very much, but–
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| Kilgannon |
You were pretty good at guessing what would work?
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| Larson |
We were pretty good at guessing what was going to work.
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| Nisbet |
Yes.
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| Larson |
We did very little changing. But then, back to what we were sort of talking about before, and that is, what did we want to look like? And why, I think, we were successful, generally, was we wanted to look like very ordinary middle class ladies. So our costumes were kind of historical, but not accurate. They were just gentle, suggestive, long–
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| Nisbet |
Long.
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| Larson |
Long dresses. And colors that were compatible. So it looked like we thought about what we wanted to look like. And then the discussions afterwards were very important in the sense that the audience was, we mentioned earlier, very interested in what our private lives were, in terms of how we could—these women, middle age, middle class women—go around the country. And did we have kids, and if so, how were we managing? And what was going on in our lives? Because basically, these women were thinking about making very personal changes in their lives. This is not just a political movement. Basically, they were talking about and seriously considering what they were doing in their day to day lives, and what their relationship with their husband was like, and how they were going to be raising their children. So these were all important questions. And almost inevitably, the very first question that anybody asked in the discussion was: Do you have kids, and if so, how are you managing it? How can you do this? How can you manage to go around, traveling around the country, and have these kids and a husband? Do you have a stable marriage? Basically, that’s what they wanted to know.
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| Kilgannon |
So how much personal information did you give back to people?
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| Larson |
We gave quite a lot.
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| Nisbet |
We did give them that and then, we answered their questions the best we could. And we did say that, of course, we were fortunate because our husbands–
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| Kilgannon |
Yes, answer the question now! [laughs]
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| Nisbet |
Our husbands took care of their children. We didn’t call it babysitting. They weren’t babysitting. They were sharing, taking care of their children.
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| Kilgannon |
They were parenting.
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| Nisbet |
They were parenting. And we arranged something for the hour the kids were home from school before they got home, that they took care of their children. And we weren’t gone for months at a time. I think we were gone, sometimes we were gone as long as ten days. But never longer than ten days.
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| Larson |
And not in the summer.
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| Nisbet |
And not in the summer at all. And then, there was actually a place at a conference place up here in Washington where they called and they said, “We really want to see your shows. We want you to bring X-show, but we want the discussion afterwards to be with your husbands, too. The two of them. We just want the two of them up there.”
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| Larson |
No. With us.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, with us? Yeah, maybe it was with us.
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| Kilgannon |
Oh. Interesting.
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| Nisbet |
So we did that.
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| Larson |
So, yeah. And we were sharing as we were going along. We were making changes in our families. And we were sharing about how we were doing that.
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| Kilgannon |
Did it help that your husbands had jobs that weren’t nine to five?
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| Larson |
Oh, yeah.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, that made a huge difference, of course, and that there was some flexibility, and that they were as supportive as they could be. [laughs]
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| Larson |
And our husbands I mean, they weren’t angels. They weren’t making these changes without being pushed. And you know, we had lots of discussions with our husbands, and lots of negotiating. And our husbands changed. And I think we were very proud of the fact that our husbands could change in this way.
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| Nisbet |
We were very proud.
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| Larson |
And I think we shared that with men and women. And I think, and women really appreciated that, and they wanted to bring their husbands.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, it was very hopeful.
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| Larson |
It is. They wanted to bring their husbands because we were dealing with some very significant ideas here, but in a non threatening way. And we weren’t lecturing, we weren’t preaching. We were putting out ideas that were worthy of consideration.
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| Kilgannon |
Well again, your use of humor has to have helped.
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| Nisbet |
The humor, and also the fact that the opponents to such carrying on, you know, would portray feminists at the time as man haters and etcetera, etcetera. And you know, we would say, “How can you hate your husbands, your sons, your brothers, your fathers?” I mean, this is crazy. So I think that that came through with us on a personal level, and also in the programs. I do remember one colleague of our husbands came up to my husband and said something about, “Oh my God, this is so fantastic that you’re doing this, but don’t tell my wife!” I remember who it was. “Don’t tell my wife.” So it was complicated. It’s great fun to go back and think about this, but it’s not as though it was not fraught with difficulty in terms of our own decisions and compromises and negotiating, figuring it out. You know, it was a troubling, but wonderful, really exhilarating time.
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| Larson |
And we shared anecdotes in terms of how we were able to explain our changing ideas to our husbands. For instance, I remember an anecdote that we told a lot, because it was true. And that is, I can remember telling Eric at one point in time, “If you and Chuck shared a meal together, or if you were sharing a meal together, would you sit on the couch in there and let him do all the work? Would you, after he prepared the meal, and then when the meal was prepared, would you go and sit on the couch and let him go in and do all the dishes?” And we didn’t say these things in loving, kind ways. I mean, we were having serious arguments, you know.
And he said, “Well, no. I guess I wouldn’t.”
And I said, “Well?”
And he said, “I guess in that circumstance, I have to think of you as Chuck.”
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| Kilgannon |
Well, there’s a breakthrough!
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| Larson |
And it made absolute sense that, you almost have to do something that dramatic, “Okay, I wouldn’t do that to a friend. Why would I do that to my wife?”
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| Nisbet |
And there was another ending to that, Pat, too, the way you said it. You know, she said just what she said to Eric. And then Pat said, “Why? Why wouldn’t you do that?”
And he said, “Well, Chuck’s my friend.”
And she said, “Ah ha.” Oh, no, bingo!
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| Larson |
Right. I remember that.
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| Nisbet |
Or something like that. It was–
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| Kilgannon |
Everybody’s having their ah-ha moment.
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| Larson |
So anyway, those were the kinds of things that we shared. And so the discussions often did take quite a personal kind of turn, particularly in this Fun and Games program.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, yeah.
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| Larson |
With the women and marriage.
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| Kilgannon |
I’m curious. I mean, as people told you things, did it change your performances in any way, or your own thinking? How much did you—you’re giving, but you’re also getting back.
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| Larson |
Oh, it enriched it. Enriched.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, we got so much back.
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| Larson |
It kept our passion alive.
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| Nisbet |
Yes.
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| Larson |
I mean, if you’re doing shows like this—and we did these shows, the stage shows, over and over and over again, you have to replenish the passion that you feel for this information. And that’s really, I think, personally, that’s what helped, what was important to me is that we could not do one of these shows and have these discussions and have this involvement with these women without realizing “this is real.” And so, yes, we would become emotionally recharged, constantly emotionally recharged, and have more insights that then we shared in discussions. We didn’t change the program.
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| Nisbet |
Not a lot.
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| Larson |
But basically, the way the programs evolved, we started off with this, and I think Give Them an Inch was our most, one that we did most often.
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| Kilgannon |
The subtitle is Women and Equality. So that would fit the ERA theme.
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| Larson |
That was the ERA, that was the general one. And then we decided we were getting so many people who wanted to discuss the personal aspect. That’s why I said we would develop this Fun and Games. And then the last one that we developed was Here She Comes, Women and Power. And basically that was morale building for the troops.
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| Kilgannon |
You should define that term. It’s taken on a different meaning lately.
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| Larson |
The women who were out there working on the ERA, who were in the trenches of this battle.
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| Kilgannon |
It was a struggle.
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| Larson |
It was a very serious struggle. So Here She Comes was sort of like that whole idea, I think, behind that. And Sandie can fill me in on this, too, was that? Yes, this is a serious struggle. And this is a struggle that did not just start now. This is a struggle that goes back a very long time. And we should feel proud and understand what that whole history of struggle was, and maintain our endeavor to continue the struggle. So that’s what that program was. And we did that for women’s groups: National Women’s Political Caucus, NOW [National Organization of Women].
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| Kilgannon |
So describe what it was like to play in that NOW convention.
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| Nisbet |
Well, you mentioned the convention. I was just saying in kind of a P.S. to what Pat’s saying here, that we end this Here She Comes with a convention. And we have a heckler: speaker, heckler, speaker, heckler, speaker. We have a heckler, who’s quoting from the New York Herald of 1853. And then Sojourner Truth, who gave a speech at the National Women’s Rights Convention in 1853. Another heckler in 1835. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a speech she delivered before the House Judiciary Committee in 1892, another heckler from the Congregational Church, Sarah Grimke, from a letter of hers on the equality of the sexes and the condition of women in 1837, and then another heckler, and then Lucy Stone with the speech she gave at the National Women’s Rights Convention in Cincinnati in 1855.
So when we’re going to women’s groups or women’s organizations, they really can identify with this kind of push-pull at these–
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| Kilgannon |
Do you think that gave people relief from their own concerns? The pressures of the day?
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| Larson |
Oh, I think so.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah, and here it’s the1800s, you know? We’re out of the twentieth century now. You know, one thing I wanted to say, just going back to this personal thing for a minute, one thing I realized during this marriage program and the changes with our husbands is you really had to believe what you wanted. Because I think, at least in our generation, a lot of women really felt somewhat territorial about being the kind of general when it came to their children. And this really changed for us.
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| Kilgannon |
That’s your area of confidence.
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| Nisbet |
This truly changed for us. It certainly changed for me. I can remember incidents. How old were Neil and Evan, they were six and five or something when we started this. And Evan, when he heard I was going to be gone for two days, he wept and cried and carried on. Pat’s heard this story! I said, “Evan, here’s a calendar, and a pen. But mark off the days, you know, I’ll give you cookies. Mark off the days and Mama’s going to be home.”
And so I’d go away, and we would do this. And one time I said, “Okay, Sweetie, Mama’s going to go away for five days. Get the calendar.”
And he said, “Oh, that’s okay, Mom. Dad’s going to be here with me.”
And you go, “What?! Go get that calendar!”
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| Kilgannon |
You’re not needed?
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| Nisbet |
No! And when they used to run through the house, they would be running to Dad. So it really—Chuck and I have talked about this—it really brought the kids really closer to their dads. Because it’s not just that weekend or after-work thing. They’re really involved with that day to day thing. I think it was very important.
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| Larson |
It was.
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| Nisbet |
Really, really important for that bond to happen.
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| Kilgannon |
Did you know, maybe not right at the beginning, but soon, consciously, that you were also modeling something for your children?
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| Larson |
Oh, yes.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, I think so. I think so. Yeah. For our daughters, for sure.
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| Kilgannon |
Or your sons.
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| Nisbet |
Or our sons, too. Yes, absolutely.
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| Kilgannon |
One can’t change without the other.
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| Nisbet |
No. True. Back to this story.
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| Larson |
In Here She Comes, this was really based—we developed this after, of course, the state ERA. So this was for the national ERA. There were women’s groups all over the country who were working on it, and basically, the way it worked was a state by state kind of thing. And so there were all kinds of women’s groups out there that needed to have a–
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| Nisbet |
A boost.
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| Larson |
You know, a boost.
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| Kilgannon |
Were there other people, troupes or whatever, doing the same, anything like what you were doing?
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| Nisbet |
There weren’t. We actually saw—an article was sent to us about another group that was a lot, suspiciously a lot, like ours, in another part of the country. At first I remember being kind of shocked. And I thought well, you know, “the more, the merrier.”
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| Larson |
I don’t remember that.
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| Nisbet |
But it was pretty much the same, actually the same material and so forth. And this person sent it because, “I think somebody saw your show!” And maybe they did. It was also a ripening, a blooming for all of this literature and curiosity about women’s history coming out at the same time. And it’s very likely–
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| Kilgannon |
I was wondering. I mean, readers’ theater as a method looks like something that—I don’t want to call them amateurs, but other people could learn and pick up. It’s a much more accessible kind of theater.
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| Larson |
Than putting on a full-blown play, for instance, would be.
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| Kilgannon |
That’s right. And it looks like something other people could adopt.
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| Larson |
We did workshops on these, too, encouraging other people in universities and so forth to do this. We did a number of workshops. And then we had a great program that we taught out here at Evergreen called Bring Her Back Alive. It was a summer program. And we had such fun. And the people that took it had such fun. And they all said they never worked so hard. Basically, what it was, was teaching them how to do what we had done. And we had a lot of high school teachers from North Thurston School District. I think they were from Timberline High School. And they were such fun.
Anyway, we had a great time. So we really encouraged people to do what we were doing and we tried to—we did a lot of workshops, actually.
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| Kilgannon |
I noticed that when I looked up “readers’ theater” on Google—the new way of doing everything—every mention of it was for teachers. It was how to do this in schools. And I thought well, yes, of course, because there’s something about the way this is organized that you could use it in that setting.
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| Nisbet |
It’s very portable.
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| Kilgannon |
It’s a really wonderful method for teaching kids about theater.
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| Nisbe |
Literally, you just grab your scripts. We’ve done it in all sorts of circumstances. We actually had, oh, no, I guess that was with Curtain Call Grandmother, we took our props around. That was later, that was later. And I remember, I remember it because it was my fault. We were doing a show at Stanford University, and we were rushing in to put on the show. And I had left our scripts in the bookstore, or left the scripts on top of the car or something. You must remember that, Pat. Oh, she noticed at the time! And we went into the bookstore, and we just bought black notebooks and blank paper. Do you remember that?
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| Larson |
I don’t remember that.
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| Niset |
You scribbled the title on the pages. And we did that–
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| Larson/td>
|
Oh, I’ve seen that. I have it in my box, and wondered what that was all about.
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| Nisbet |
We did that show without the scripts.
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| Kilgannon |
You had it pretty deeply in your brain by then.
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| Nisbet |
And that sort of illustrates that we did the readers’ theater not casually—readers’ theater isn’t because you’re just too lazy to memorize it.
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| Kilgannon |
Oh, no, no, I don’t mean that.
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| Nisbet |
No, I know you didn’t. And I don’t, it is easier in the sense that it’s portable, and you don’t have such demands as–
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| Kilgannon |
You don’t have sets and things.
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| Nisbet |
–sets and things. And you can change it more easily if you need to. But you still have to, I think, be very careful of how it’s put together. And also I think Pat mentioned if you’re standing in front of people with your face buried in a book, its easier to lose them. And what we used to do is, our transitions would be—during Pat’s piece, she would come forward and I would step back. I wouldn’t turn my back, but I would step back and focus on her. So that’s part of the theatrics thing that you have–
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| Kilgannon |
Ah, you’re putting up a kind of energy?
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| Nisbet |
Yeah, and so if some of the audience is looking at me, they’ll see I’m looking at Pat, and they watch Pat.
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| Kilgannon |
Interesting.
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| Nisbet |
And also, I think there’s something very interesting about that. I mean, Pat is a wonderful actress. [laughs] I can remember times that we were doing this, and it was exactly what I said. She moved forward, I moved back to look at her, interested in what she said. And whatever it was, was a very passionate, passionate piece. And she told me later she forgot, or just kind of messed up the words of the last three sentences, and she was saying [mutters]. And nobody even noticed. They rose to their feet! [laughter]
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| Kilgannon |
You expressed it in some way?
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| Nisbet |
And Pat, she said, I just don’t know. And I have done the same thing. It’s interesting. So a part of it is that if you catch, if you have an audience, and they get the gist of what you are saying, you can be saying [made-up language]. [laughter]
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| Larson |
If you move on quickly, it’s their bad hearing!
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| Nisbet |
That’s right. “It must be my hearing.”
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| Larson |
“It must be my fault.”
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| Nisbet |
I remember getting a coughing fit onstage, and we have all kinds of stuff–
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| Kilgannon |
The little mishaps.
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| Larson |
But then the other thing is, when we were performing we had some requirements that we would send ahead of time. We had to have a couple of chairs; we had to have a table that we could–
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| Kilgannon |
Some kind of centering thing?
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| Larson |
But that was it.
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| Nisbet |
But we didn’t ever use music stands, did we?
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| Larson |
No.
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| Nisbet |
We just had them in our hands.
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| Larson |
The table, basically, was to put our scripts down on. Or, or sometimes we could have a conversation across the table.
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| Nisbet |
Right. Right. And another thing, theatrically is, you have to let the audience not worry about you. So I remember there was one place where there was a low hanging light.
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| Kilgannon |
Distracting if they’re worried you’re going to bonk your head?
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| Nisbet |
You go out in front before the show and you say, “Look, I’m not going to hit this.” [laughter] “This is not going to hit us, we’re going to be okay.” And they sigh in relief.
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| Kilgannon |
It would be distracting if you’re watching the actors, waiting for them to fall off the stage or something.
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| Nisbet |
You know, you think of the women’s movement, and it’s political, but it was really the theatricality of it that was, I think, very important to hold our audiences, even if they were feeling a little dubious or hostile about what we might be saying.
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| Kilgannon |
At this period of time, if you’re interested in the women’s movement, or even if you’re not, you are being bombarded with things on television and print, in the newspapers; there’s just a lot of ferment about it. But not a lot of theater. That’s a very different approach. So it allows people to kind of come to it from a really different place. And you were not preaching. You’re not haranguing. You’re not giving them hard information. You’ve opened the back door, basically.
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| Larson |
That’s a good way of putting it.
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| Nisbet |
I just want to point out one thing here. And that is that—before I forget—and that is that, at some point in time, not only did we respect the fact that we found this wonderful history. But the fact that somebody in this state had actually collected an incredible amount of it and stored it at the State Library. We could never have done this project had it not been. And I don’t know who it was, but I suspect it was a woman librarian someplace early on. Because they had the most incredible collection. They had The History of Women’s Suffrage by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, which was a huge tome, and very hard to find. Very hard to find. And that was just sitting right up there. So that, with a whole bunch of other books. And just, I mean, I couldn’t believe, and that’s really what allowed us to do this program.
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| Larson |
Absolutely.
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| Nisbet |
And so I have to give obeisance to whatever wonderful woman–
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| Kilgannon |
It would be good to know. Maryan Reynolds ran the State Library; I wonder if it was her, in particular, call.
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| Nisbet |
I wouldn’t be surprised.
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| Kilgannon |
There were some very strong women librarians.
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| Larson |
And so it was an incredible collection and really important, and I think it’s something to remind us of, that it really is important to be collecting these things and to be putting them aside, because you never know which way to use them.
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| Nisbet |
It was as though someone was just putting it there for us to discover.
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| Kilgannon |
Luckily you found it.
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| Larson |
And then did you tell her about how we discovered Josiah Allen?
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| Kilgannon |
No, I didn’t hear about that.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, that is wonderful. Oh, that was a great discovery.
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| Larson |
That was in our car. We were driving. That was just, we just couldn’t believe our good fortune. Well anyway, we were over in Eastern Washington. And was it Union Gap we found a book? Anyway, we were performing. And we had a little time to spare. And we went into a secondhand bookstore–
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| Nisbet |
Which we often did.
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| Larson |
We were just wasting a few minutes. So we went in there and we saw this book. And I think I was the one that picked it up and I said, “Oh, God, Sandie, I don’t know what this is, but we’ve got to have it.” Because it was—it had a title, and then, “by Josiah Allen’s wife.” So we said somehow this is worth our having this book. So we bought it, and then we drove home. And one of us read it to the other. And I frankly can’t remember who was reading to whom.
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| Nisbet |
No.
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| Kilgannon |
As long as you remember who was driving. [laughter]
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| Larson |
I don’t remember. Anyway, one of us started reading aloud to whoever was driving. And both of us started laughing. We couldn’t believe it.
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| Nisbet |
It was wonderful.
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| Larson |
Anyway, she’s just a wonderful character.
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| Kilgannon |
Can you explain who she is? Because she’s pretty obscure.
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| Larson |
I never heard of her.
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| Nisbet |
I think most people have not heard of her.
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| Larson |
Which is too bad. Because it’s just as funny now as it was when she wrote it. She wrote in 1880. And the other one was 1892.
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| Kilgannon |
So you found another book?
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| Nisbet |
It was translated into like fifteen languages or something.
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| Larson |
Well, that reminds me of the State Library. Because we found this book and read to each other and said, “Oh my God, this is so funny.” What it is, is Josiah Allen’s wife is just a real smart lady, but she’s just an ordinary woman, but she really understands how women are not taken seriously. And then she’s got these sidekicks who are really stupid about it. So they just have these wonderful, wonderful conversations.
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| Kilgannon |
So it’s a dialog?
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| Nisbet |
Yeah. Yeah.
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| Larson |
And it’s a novel. And there is some point, you know. But anyway, we were laughing and carrying on. We put it into this “woman and marriage” program. And then we discovered that there were other books by this woman at the State Library. So we went down, and that’s how we have another one for Here She Comes, Women and Power. But we had overlooked that book because we’d never heard of Marietta Holley.
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| Kilgannon |
So you made a real discovery.
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| Nisbet |
And she was a favorite—we found out she was a favorite author of some of these suffrage women.
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| Kilgannon |
So they knew about her?
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| Nisbet |
Yes. They knew about her.
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| Larson |
She was very popular.
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| Kilgannon |
I wonder why she has been so lost to time.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, there’s probably many who have been lost.
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| Kilgannon |
True. But you snatched her back.
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| Nisbet |
Anyway, those were great for our shows.
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| Kilgannon |
What gems! What gems.
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| Nisbet |
They were so funny. And there was another find that we didn’t do in this show. But The Three Marias: The New Portuguese Letters by three Portuguese women named Maria. By three women all named Maria. That was given to us, I think, when we had the big NOW convention in Houston. Maybe you know where, someone told us about it. No, they were there. One of the Marias was there reading at one of the conventions. And to make a long story short, we ended up with the right to do it. And I think we were the only two in the country who were allowed to read from that. And we read it in quite a wonderful women’s conference in Los Angeles. Right in the NOW conference. And that was very, very powerful. I can’t remember the dates when it was written, but it was–
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| Larson |
It was shortly before we did them.
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| Nisbet |
But it was three Portuguese friends, these writers, who again kind of got together, and they had a writing, kind of like they would meet every week or every month, and they started writing these pieces that could have been right out of here, but I mean–
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| Kilgannon |
Their own experience?
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| Nisbet |
Their own experience, and their own situation. It’s very powerful stuff.
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| Kilgannon |
And because it’s slightly foreign, it’s a different kind of mirror?
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| Larson |
Well, and it was contemporary. It’s very contemporary.
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| Nisbet |
They were writing about–
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| Kilgannon |
But it gives you a little bit of distance, like you were saying with the historical material. I cannot go any further without asking you to explain your name, the Co-Respondents, before I forget.
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| Nisbet |
We have—well, maybe we’ll have two different stories. We sat down, we were trying to figure out what to do with our name. And we thought, co-respondent. I mean, I don’t remember, maybe Pat will go back to the details. But we ended up thinking about two people responding to whatever. But we had a man come up to us in one of our shows and say, “That title, the Co-Respondents, it is just excellent! It is just excellent! And I know exactly where it came from.”
And I said, “Oh, well, good.”
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| Kilgannon |
Really? “Tell me.” [laughs]
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| Nisbet |
And then he talked about the co-respondents in a trial, in a divorce case. And some legal aspect. The legal aspects and the Latin or wherever it came from.
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| Kilgannon |
And are you just kind of nodding?
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| Larson |
Yes.
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| Nisbet |
Yes, you’re absolutely right! Anyway, Pat, maybe you can remember more.
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| Larson |
It turned out to have a double meaning. There were two of us and basically, we thought of it as there were two of us and we were responding to the stupid arguments that were being put forth about the changing roles of women.
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| Nisbet |
And also the letter, Pat, that you did, that I loved so. Somehow that gave us the idea, Rainer Maria Rilke? Remember Marie Rainer Rilke? It was one you read. Do you remember it?
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| Larson |
Here? This one right here? Letters to a Young Poet?
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| Nisbet |
Yes. Yes. Somehow I remember in connection with the title, we were responding to letters and writing. But I can’t remember all of it. Do you remember how that starts out? But that’s a wonderful—I thought very important, in explaining the philosophy.
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| Larson |
And then we haven’t really talked about the music.
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| Kilgannon |
No. And I don’t want to forget that. You worked with a couple of different women.
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| Larson |
As I told you, we quickly decided we needed music. So we started out working with a woman that Sandie knew who had a beautiful voice. Denise Livingston. And first, as you can see, the very first time we did Battle-axe, we didn’t have music. But then when we started actually performing it around more than that first time, we were with Denise already. And she did these songs, and she wrote one song. But the rest were—as you can see, we weren’t paying attention to copyright.
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| Kilgannon |
So you have a Bobby Darrin tune, and John Denver.
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| Larson |
We were just sneaking around at that point. This is very early.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, does it help that you were doing these things for free? I don’t know how copyright works in these situations.
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| Larson |
Well, no. That’s not really, basically we knew, and almost everything on here is under copyright. So we stopped doing this program relatively early on.
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| Kilgannon |
So the music, how did it work in the performance?
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| Larson |
And then Denise wrote a number of songs. She had a beautiful voice, but she never liked performing. She really didn’t like performing.
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| Nisbet |
She was shy.
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| Larson |
Quite shy. And she finally just said, “It’s just not for me. It’s painful.”
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| Nisbet |
The bigger it got, the bigger places we went to, the bigger the audiences, I mean, she was great with the small groups. And as a matter of fact, today, 2008, Denise is very active. And she’s still writing songs. She’s singing solo in an Olympia choir here. I just heard from her last week. I’m so glad that she’s still doing her writing.
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| Larson |
She had a sweet voice, which is really nice. Nice quality for us. But she just didn’t like it. Didn’t like doing it. So then, when she just said “I can’t do this anymore,” we agreed it was just not going to work out. So then we auditioned a number of women and then ended up choosing Maggie Unrue. Anyway, the idea with the music always was to tie the things together and to soften the whole program.
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| Nisbet |
The whole program, yeah.
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| Larson |
And I think it worked.
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| Nisbet |
And Maggie had a very strong–
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| Larson |
Maggie had a stronger voice. So it was a slightly different thing. But she could certainly sing a sweet song, too.
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| Nisbet |
And she wrote some–
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| Larson |
And she wrote, so they both ended up writing–
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| Nisbet |
Original songs.
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| Larson |
–for them. And anyway, even after we changed vocalists, some of Denise’s songs continued to be used.
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| Nisbet |
And she also sang a few songs by Malvina Reynolds. Malvina Reynolds was a friend of ours. And we were very happy to have Denise singing “Inching Along at the Edge of the World.” Do you remember that one? But most of the songs–
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| Larson |
But you can see Denise had songs in all three shows still. Anyway, the music was, I think, really important, too.
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| Kilgannon |
I imagine it helps you pace your performances. Make transitions and change your tone a little bit.
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| Nisbet |
Right. Helps you, it gave you a little–
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| Kilgannon |
You put it in other voices? Your own two voices over and over might have been hard to do that.
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| Larson |
So the way we would do the music is we would say to the vocalist, “We need something here. We need something that gets us from this idea to this idea.”
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| Kilgannon |
And that would be their job to figure out–
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| Larson |
To figure out how to do it.
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| Nisbet |
And they would do wonderful, wonderful songs.
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| Kilgannon |
I keep picturing you as being physically close to your audience. Especially, well, in a living room. But even in the halls you played in, were you pretty–
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| Larson |
We played in some very big–
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| Nisbet |
Purdue University, we had this huge auditorium with a thousand people, an international convention.
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| Larson |
Well, and the national convention. But we would play—one of the first, I’ll never forget this performance that we did in Wenatchee, over here. This was for the state equal rights amendment. We were in a private home. And it was an afternoon tea and an evening performance in the same home.
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| Nisbet |
Early on.
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| Larson |
Very early. So we were all ready to go on, and there was just a tiny audience. I mean, there must have been like–
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| Nisbet |
Six.
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| Larson |
–five or six people.
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| Kilgannon |
Oh, very intimate.
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| Larson |
So the woman was saying, she was so apologetic, “Oh, I’m so sorry, I tried really hard to get a bigger audience, maybe you just don’t want to do it for such a small amount of people.”
And we said, “Look, as long as we’re outnumbered, we’ll do it.”
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| Kilgannon |
[laughter] As long as it’s not one on one?
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| Larson |
So we got out there and we did the program for these six little people that are out there.
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| Kilgannon |
That must have been intense. [laughs]
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| Larson |
And we did it just the way we always do it. But you pull back if you’re that close to someone. You make a distinction of how much you’re going to project. So anyway, and this one woman was sitting in there–
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| Nisbet |
Maude.
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| Larson |
–and I think her name was Maude.
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| Nisbet |
Maude.
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| Larson |
And Maude was sitting in there, and she just had this, you know—since you’re so close and you have only six people to focus on, I mean, you definitely knew how each person was responding. And Maude was sitting there just looking so serious, and just like really–
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| Nisbet |
Never changed her expression.
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| Larson |
Never changed her expression. So when it was all over, Sandie and I were laughing and saying, “Boy, did Maude love that program.” Anyway, so the evening came, and there was a big group of people. It was very successful. The place was really crowded. And people kept coming in and coming in.
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| Kilgannon |
So the second performance of the day?
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| Larson |
Second performance of the day. And so then we asked somebody after the program, “Well, how did you decide to come tonight?”
And she said, “Oh, Maude told us.”
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| Nisbet |
Maude spread the word.
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| Larson |
Maude spread the word! She said it was the most wonderful thing she– So you just can’t tell.
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| Nisbet |
You cannot tell. You cannot tell.
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| Larson |
Anyway, Maude got us that big audience that evening.
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| Kilgannon |
Maybe she was so busy processing.
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| Larson |
I guess so. And we decided you just really can’t make these assumptions.
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| Kilgannon |
That’s interesting. So, let’s see. All the time you were doing this, were you being paid? Or was this just part of your own personal activism?
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| Nisbet |
No, we–
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| Kilgannon |
There were expenses paid. But did you actually earn any money?
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| Larson |
Yeah, we actually got a salary. We never made a lot of money. It was always considered that good thing we had something else going in our lives. I had real estate that my husband and I were involved in. And we were making—we didn’t depend on our salaries for making a living. But we did get salaries.
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| Kilgannon |
Did you, right from the beginning?
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| Nisbet |
Oh, no. Not right from the beginning.
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| Kilgannon |
At what point did you decide that hey, you were professional actors, so then you ought to be paid?
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| Larson |
I think maybe when we went off to Utah.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah, that could be. And at some point we figured out, you know, if we did not have—if we were single women, we probably could have eked out a living on what we were doing. And that is, for actors, except for one percent of all of the millions of actors, that was very, that was good. It was good. Especially, I mean, it was a grassroots movement. But we could have—it was enough that we could have eked out a living.
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| Kilgannon |
But people did not expect you to do this for free?
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| Larson |
No. We didn’t do it for free. We would do it for free for a benefit. NOW, for instance, but I believe our standard practice was that we expected the universities to pay us a salary.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah.
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| Larson |
And once we figured that we had an economic base, that the universities and colleges were paying our salaries and our transportation, very often we stayed in people’s houses. We weren’t asking for hotel rooms and so forth. And that was fun, actually staying in people’s houses. We really met a lot of wonderful women all over the country. And so very often we’d be staying in somebody’s house, and that person would be a member of the local NOW organization or the Women’s Political Caucus or whatever the local group was. And they would put out some kind of a—we would do something for them that would probably be a benefit. I don’t think those women’s groups ever paid us any salary. That was a contribution on our part. So we were making our living from the colleges and universities.
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| Kilgannon |
That makes sense. So, were you able to kind of keep that straight, what was professional and what was your contribution?
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| Larson |
No, it was all professional. It was all professional. Oh, yes. I mean, basically, but these women’s groups did provide us with living accommodations. Basically, they gave us—we stayed in their homes, they fed us. That was their contribution in terms of financial things.
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| Kilgannon |
Because, of course, many people in the movement did tremendous amounts of work for the love of it.
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| Larson |
Yeah. So I don’t think we ever got any–
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| Kilgannon |
I just wondered if there was any kind of issue with being paid.
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| Larson |
Well, we never got paid from any of the women’s groups.
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| Nisbet |
And we didn’t get paid a lot.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, no, I didn’t think so.
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| Larson |
But we, at that point in time, colleges and universities had considerable budgets for these kinds of programs. And that’s basically how we figured out how to make it work. And that’s why we started through universities, always. So we got—the universities would pay for our transportation and give us our salaries.
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| Kilgannon |
Then the rest of it was your choice?
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| Larson |
Yes. So we’d probably get—you could see that we would get a booking at a university and then we would do the other stuff.
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| Nisbet |
And do shows around. Try to always get some other gig going.
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| Kilgannon |
And you were working, you were doing some sort of development of real estate with your husband. Were you, Sandie, doing anything else?
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| Nisbet |
Similar, was I? Let’s see, I’m trying to remember when I started teaching. I didn’t do that. No, I started teaching at the college in the eighties. And we developed our television production company during the eighties.
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| Kilgannon |
Right.
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| Larson |
Now during that period of time, we really weren’t thinking about making a lot of money. We were really raising our children.
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| Kilgannon |
Flexible schedules.
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| Larson |
Right. That was it. As Sandie was saying, we really never were gone more than ten days at a time, typically. And that would be during the school year. And then we didn’t travel during Christmas vacation or any of the kids’ vacations.
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| Kilgannon |
Your husbands’ college schedule would fit that?
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| Larson |
So we would do local performances, but we wouldn’t be out of state when the kids were not in school.
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| Kilgannon |
So if you worked closely with NOW and different groups, did you also belong as members of those groups?
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| Nisbet |
Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
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| Kilgannon |
Besides NOW, was there any other local group?
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| Larson & Nisbet |
The Women’s Political Caucus.
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| Kilgannon |
So who would be the big people in Olympia that you would have worked with? Was this your local chapter here?
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| Larson |
We were contributing members. But our contribution in terms of the amount of work that we did on the issues had totally to do with the Co-Respondents. We really were not engaged on any other level.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah. We couldn’t. It was too big.
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| Kilgannon |
That’s a huge contribution. I don’t think you were exactly slacking.
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| Larson |
No. We weren’t. So we really can’t talk about–
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| Kilgannon |
So you didn’t belong to the sort of go-to-meetings type of things?
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| Nisbet |
No. But I mean, we would do things for the Rotary Club. We would do things for NOW meetings.
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| Larson |
If you look at here, you will see that we did a lot of fundraising for the women’s–
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| Kilgannon |
I just wondered, who was your group in Olympia that you—I would not necessarily call them your support group, but your colleagues, if you had them?
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| Nisbet |
You know, I think that’s a good question. When I look back on it, it was a very, very busy time. We were very busy putting together shows, doing the research, doing the shows. And we knew a lot of women in town, we really, through NOW, through the YWCA, but it was largely through groups for whom we performed or with whom we performed–
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| Kilgannon |
Just wondered if there was a kind of women’s community in Olympia that you could plug into.
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| Larson |
I’ll tell you what was going on with us is we were out of town so much that we really—I don’t think we really were terribly involved in the actual local scene. We knew–
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| Nisbet |
We knew a lot of Evergreen people.
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| Larson |
We knew a lot of people. And for instance, Karen Fraser was an early–
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| Nisbet |
Oh, right. And what was Carol’s last name? I don’t want to say, who was Carol Dick? Who was Carol? Anyway, I can see her. She was very active in the wages issue.
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| Larson |
Oh right, equal work for equal pay. Comparable worth.
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| Nisbet |
Comparable worth, yeah.
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| Larson |
She lived right down the street. I’m hopeless on names. Just hopeless.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, you talked about Michelle Pailthorp.
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| Larson |
Yeah, Mickey was big. Gisela was big in our lives.
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| Kilgannon |
At some point, you seem to get to know Alice Yee.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, very well.
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| Kilgannon |
You did some work with her in Ellensburg.
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| Larson |
Alice is one of our all-time favorite people.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, she’s just wonderful.
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| Larson |
What a worker.
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| Kilgannon |
She ran the women’s center at Central University, right?
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| Larson |
Right. And she was a dean. When we first met her, she was a dean. No, she was head of the women’s center. Anyway, so between her and Carolyn Wilberg, we did a lot of–
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| Nisbet |
Carolyn Wilberg, they wrote a lot of grants for us.
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| Larson |
The librarian over there. Alice Yee was wonderful.
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| Nisbet |
She’s still wonderful.
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| Larson |
And Alice is still wonderful. She’s just such an incredible organizer. And she’s so optimistic and positive. And that was one of their great joys for us to meet her and to work with her. Then I remember Celia Banks.
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| Nisbet |
Celia Banks, yeah. That was the other person. Do you know her?
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| Larson |
At Washington State?
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| Nisbet |
At Washington State. Celia Banks was wonderful.
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| Larson |
And anyway, we just had a lot of different women from different places. And I am hopeless on names. Just hopeless.
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| Kilgannon |
I was trying to figure out where you–
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| Nisbet |
Name some more. [laughs]
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| Larson |
In the community. Well, and then we had an agent. We had first Adrienne Alexander.
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| Nisbet |
Adrienne Alexander.
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| Kilgannon |
Oh, right. Her name shows up on in your literature.
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| Nisbet |
And then Penny Hoffman.
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| Larson |
And then Penny Hoffman.
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| Kilgannon |
And they would help with the bookings?
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| Larson |
They did it. They found that part. Yes. The business end. They did it. And helped figure out how to promote it. And Adrienne had a position with, what they called, was it the EYE FIVE project?
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| Nisbet |
Oh, that’s right. That’s right.
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| Kilgannon |
Let’s see, you did this work for years. But then you began to broaden your base just a little bit with some other kinds of work?
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| Larson |
Well, what was going on at the end, the International Women’s Year, with the Ellensburg conference, which–
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| Kilgannon |
Yes. You did perform there.
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| Larson |
We did perform there. And then we performed at the national conference, also, in Houston.
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| Kilgannon |
Let’s pause just a bit. Now the Ellensburg conference, if readers know about it, had two main groups there in attendance, you might call it. There were the original groups of women who were very activist and working towards passage of the ERA and all those kinds of programs. And then there was a very large group of people who felt left out of that particular endeavor and, in fact, opposed it. And came to the conference and said, “We’re Washington women, too, and you’re not representing us.” So they were somewhat comparably sized groups at that conference, which kind of threw everything into a lot of turmoil.
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| Nisbet |
That’s right.
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| Kilgannon |
Because the first group was not expecting that kind of mixture. When you go to perform for such a hotly contested group of people, does that change how that feels? What was that like for you? How much did you know what was going on in the hall?
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| Larson |
Oh, there would be no way you could escape.
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| Nisbet |
You could not escape, yeah.
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| Larson |
And in fact we were involved in it. I can remember going into a meeting, you know, one of the meetings, and basically doing Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Remember that?
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| Nisbet |
That’s right. Absolutely.
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| Larson |
Because it seemed so apropos to me. I mean, I just did my little–
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| Kilgannon |
You were just channeling? [laughs]
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| Larson |
I just became her, yes. So we were very involved then to the point that I almost cannot remember performing. It was such an explosive scene.
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| Nisbet |
That took over.
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| Kilgannon |
The descriptions of it are very tense.
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| Larson |
I almost don’t remember performing. I just remember the whole scene.
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| Nisbet |
We did perform! [laughs]
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| Kilgannon |
Do you think in retrospect it helped people? Added some humor?
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| Larson |
I’m not sure it made any difference one way or the other. I mean, basically everything was coming to a head at that point.
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| Nisbet |
You can’t blame the conference. That was in 1977.
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| Kilgannon |
No. The tide was shifting pretty rapidly in those days.
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| Larson |
And we started seeing that. This is one of the reasons we stopped performing. If you look at our performance schedule, that was the last big year we had.
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| Nisbet |
1977, yeah.
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| Larson |
And basically what was going on is the colleges were losing their money. We were not able to find as much booking that would pay. And everything just felt like it was winding down. And it really did.
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| Kilgannon |
Does, in retrospect, it look like 1977 was a watershed year, when the whole movement that had been just flowing over the land, run out of gas, so to speak? Was there so much opposition building that the reform effort was much more dispersed and much more confused, trying to figure out what was really going on?
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| Larson |
I don’t know about that.
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| Kilgannon |
There was this kind of buildup into the early Reagan years of the 1980s in the Republican Party—which had always endorsed the ERA but for the first time said that they would not. And you start to see a backwards kind of movement. Almost everyone points to 1977 as the year you could really feel the difference.
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| Larson |
And it’s just clear that you look in 1977 and we had very few bookings in that year. But it’s clearly winding down to the point that we had already decided we were not going to tour in ’78.
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| Nisbet |
Is that the one we ended up with? Was that our final?
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| Larson |
Yes.
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| Nisbet |
A terrible year.
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| Larson |
The very last show that we did was where we were heckled. That’s the very last show that we ever did.
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| Kilgannon |
Hard way to end.
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| Larson |
As the three of us. You can see by our performance schedule, Sandie and I went on and did excerpts for another, what, three years? Four years? Where we simply took these programs apart, had no music, did shortened versions. Basically did no promotion ourselves. All of these were based upon somebody calling and saying, “Could you please do half an hour on such and such?” And so we would.
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| Nisbet |
And then we were invited in to do television, to do it on TV.
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| Kilgannon |
So let’s talk about the difference between live theater and television, because you do start to do television.
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| Larson |
Well, we started off, because we just had such love for this history that we had discovered and we just thought well, it would just be nice to leave a record of this somehow.
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| Kilgannon |
Performance is so ephemeral?
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| Larson |
Yes. Because of all this, and as far as we knew really nobody else was doing anything quite like that. So it was just sort of like that’s how we would call an end to that whole thing, just simply get it on television.
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| Kilgannon |
Document it.
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| Larson |
Yeah. So that’s what we did with that first thing; it’s called Bring Her Back Alive.
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| Kilgannon |
How did you do it? Did you approach some television producers or did they contact you?
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| Nisbet |
Actually, excuse me, weren’t we called? We were doing this Dare to Try, which was a series of five shows–
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| Larson |
No. This is where we started. Bring Her Back Alive.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, that’s way up there. Oh, okay.
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| Kilgannon |
So someone called you or you began to promote this? “This would make a good piece.”
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| Larson |
We thought it would make a good TV production.
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| Kilgannon |
Was it difficult to break into TV?
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| Larson |
Well, we had to get a grant.
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| Nisbet |
But we’d also been doing, had we been doing our other things? Take it to the People? We hadn’t done that yet?
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| Larson |
No, no, no. The very first thing we did was Bring Her Back Alive.
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| Nisbet |
Okay. Bring Her Back Alive.
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| Larson |
And that was just because we wanted to have a record left. And so we did go to—at that time, Channel Thirteen was a PBS station. So we went to the PBS station and got a grant through the Washington Arts Commission, I think.
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| Kilgannon |
Is that the EYE FIVE?
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| Larson |
The EYE FIVE was very early on. Adrienne Alexander somehow got a job on it and that was important for us.
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| Kilgannon |
What is that?
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| Larson |
Arranging speakers or performances or something along I-5 in Washington State. And I never really understood exactly what it was.
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| Kilgannon |
Rather clever. It’s spelled E-Y-E
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| Nisbet |
That’s funny.
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| Kilgannon |
It seemed to be a state-supported program.
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| Larson |
For us, it was important, because Adrienne was our agent, and she had this position. So she was able to—that was one of the ways we were able to get some early bookings.
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| Kilgannon |
So when you’re working for a camera—not a live audience—that’s, I imagine for you, a different experience. Your energy is perhaps more focused on each other? I’m not sure how that works.
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| Larson |
Well, we weren’t as terribly happy with the way we ended up acting on those shows. Because we had been performing so long that we were just too into performing for the stage. And we didn’t, I think–
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| Nisbet |
Pull back.
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| Larson |
I think we both believe we didn’t pull back enough for the television.
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| Nisbet |
So it ends up being—today when we look at it, it just feels very melodramatic to me. To me, they just seem very melodramatic.
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| Larson |
We just both look at it and say, “I wish we’d had more direction,” saying “Pull back a little bit more.” We pulled back quite a bit. We didn’t pull back enough.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, as a person with no theater background and one who has only watched the videos of your performances, they didn’t come across that way to me.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, good. [laughs]
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| Kilgannon |
I was so struck by your relationship. And it was so clear how much you knew each other in a very fundamental way.
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| Nisbet |
Well, we did.
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| Kilgannon |
And how you could play off each other. Your dynamic was incredible to watch. And the economy of pared down essentials: the things that you had on, and just your gestures. And you had almost nothing with you. But you told these stories. And sometimes it would be just your face. And sometimes it would be you interacting. I was moved.
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| Nisbet |
Well, good.
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| Kilgannon |
I didn’t have any problems sitting there in my living room by myself watching that.
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| Larson |
Okay, because Sandie and I both looking at it today, oh my God! We should have pulled back.
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| Kilgannon |
I’m not a very critical audience.
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| Larson |
Well, I’m glad. Because a lot of people said they liked them.
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| Kilgannon |
I think they were very powerful.
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| Larson |
I think the material was powerful. And this is really why we wanted to get it on television, to have a record there. This material, we were so moved by the material. We didn’t have any trouble–
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| Kilgannon |
That really came through. You also look like you were having so much fun.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, we did. We had great fun with this.
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| Kilgannon |
You had this irrepressible energy.
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| Larson |
Well, I can tell you that, we both, I believe, would say, that that period in our life was maybe one of the most fun things we could ever do.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, absolutely.
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| Larson |
We had a wonderful time. Not only because we loved performing so much, but we met such incredible women all over the country. And these were women who were involved in all of these political things. And they were generous and funny and creative. When you talk about what did we get from performing, we got things from our audience. But we got an incredible amount from the women that we met who were involved in this movement. We met them all over the country. And they were just wonderful women. Just wonderful.
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| Nisbet |
Yes. Absolutely. And it was really an education. I mean, you always learned something. These women were doing something in their own communities. And they had their own demons they were fighting. And conflicts that were similar. It was an overwhelmingly positive awakening and strengthening. You could talk about equality, and we’re all equal, but boy, when you are just being out there, I mean, it might sound trite, but the strength, just the strength and the passion, and still the nurturing quality of women trying to balance that thing of being loving with the people in their families, and dealing with wanting to change for their own generation and for their own children.
Which brings me up to the point that we could talk about maybe, that I’ve been feeling, the last few years. It’s sort of like you think, “Okay, that’s taken care of.” But it’s not.
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| Larson |
No.
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| Nisbet |
You just start it over and over and over again.
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| Kilgannon |
The human condition?
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| Larson |
Isn’t it!
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| Nisbet |
How easy to forget.
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| Kilgannon |
That’s why the suffrage era still resonates. And for our daughters, perhaps, the ERA generation will resonate in the same way?
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| Larson |
You were asking about a local support group. And I actually was struck when you asked me that because I don’t think we had much of a local group. But what we had was an incredible support group of every time we went into a community, of being drawn into their local group.
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| Nisbet |
That’s right.
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| Larson |
We were immediately part of that group. And there was a kind of trust that existed. Maybe it’s because of the programs we were doing, and people felt empathetic for us because of having felt empathy for those characters we were playing.
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| Kilgannon |
You were saying a truth they could identify with?
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| Larson |
Yes. And they were saying it, and what happens when you do that is you’re saying something somebody wanted to say and didn’t have the words to say themselves. So that’s what this is all about. So we were immediately part of that local scene, and we were just immersed in it, and it’s thrilling. It felt kind of sad when you took off. But then exhilarating to go to the next place.
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| Nisbet |
That’s right. That’s right.
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| Larson |
So we had an incredible–
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| Nisbet |
The other thing, I think—for a lot of women, and I know for me, I think for both of us—but I really knew none of these suffragists. I knew about Susan B. Anthony, but I didn’t know about Lucy Stone or Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, there were so many.
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| Nisbet |
Or Sojourner Truth. I mean, in those days, they were all—it was like these amazing voices–
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| Kilgannon |
One discovery after another?
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| Larson |
Oh, yeah.
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| Nisbet |
–that I had never heard of. And then Marietta Holley, who’s she? And that, when I look back on it, I’m just thinking how can you call yourself educated if you haven’t heard of Marietta Holley or Elizabeth Cady Stanton? Well now, those voices are out more. But that was also part of the joy, I think, really, really part of the joy, was–
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| Kilgannon |
Giving those women back their voices?
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| Larson |
That’s right. That’s right.
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| Kilgannon |
Bringing them back from the shadows.
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| Larson |
Yeah. Abigail Scott Duniway. Oh my goodness.
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| Kilgannon |
You did some very local things, then, on TV, based on local oral histories. And you look like you mined everything you came across. You did a program on Narcissa Whitman. You did an interesting film dialog between Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, the great black orator, pre Civil War era spokesperson for abolition. In Tenino.
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| Nisbet |
The old railroad station.
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| Kilgannon |
How did that happen? That was kind of an unlikely venue.
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| Larson |
Well, we were just looking around for sites, and there was this old train depot. And we just decided well, we could put Susan B and Frederick Douglass together in that depot.
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| Kilgannon |
Was that a real event? Not that they were ever in Tenino, but did they ever do that kind of dialog with each other?
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| Larson |
They were both very much involved in the anti-slavery movement. And they were both involved in the women’s suffrage movement.
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| Kilgannon |
Yes. He was one of the great men that supported women suffrage.
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| Larson |
But see, I’m not sure that they ever met at a railway station.
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| Nisbet |
But the dialog was real.
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| Larson |
But they could have. The dialog was real. It was taken from their letters and writing.
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| Kilgannon |
I was wracking my brain whether or not I knew, historically, if they had ever met in that way.
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| Larson |
And then they did have a great public debate about giving the vote to men after the Civil War and excluding women. And this was a huge debate.
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| Kilgannon |
Very, very divisive.
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| Larson |
And it was very important. And so that’s basically what we were–
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| Nisbet |
And Pat played Susan B. Anthony and won a state Emmy Award for her performance. It was just, she did a magnificent job. And we had, what was his name, William, who was our Frederick Douglass.
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| Larson |
Marshall.
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| Nisbet |
William Marshall came out from L.A. to do that role. That was very strong.
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| Larson |
So that was really an outgrowth of the research that we’d done here for these programs. And then Narcissa Whitman was just a logical local–
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| Kilgannon |
The local story.
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| Larson |
If we wanted to talk about, you could see. Every one of these had a strong woman in it. So when we wanted to deal with something about the Native Americans, Narcissa Whitman would certainly fit into that. And then when we did the program on the ecological story.
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| Nisbet |
With the damming of the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite. And that was interesting. A hundred years later, it was in Congress. I can’t remember if it was maybe in the nineties, there was this movement to un-dam the Hetch Hetchy Valley. And that had been predicted a hundred years earlier. So in a way, that show, too, is still really very, very apropos today.
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| Larson |
And the debate there was between Phelan, who was the mayor of San Francisco, and what was your character’s name?
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| Nisbet |
Harriet Monroe.
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| Larson |
A poet.
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| Nisbet |
The poet. And there was a line we used at the end of that. What was it, Pat? The advice about—and I think about it with all of these subjects we’re talking about: with vigilance. You must be vigilant for the loopholes, the legal loopholes, where somebody will jump in and change, maybe–
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| Kilgannon |
Slip through and build a dam?
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| Nisbet |
Slip through and build a dam. Well, in that case, the Sierra Club just ran out of money and exhaustion. John Muir, that was how the Sierra Club started. But then they were exhausted. And the San Francisco powers that be still had the money and were able to get their dam.
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| Larson |
San Francisco had just survived the massive earthquake. They said, “We need all the help we can get.”
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| Nisbet |
“For the mothers and children.”
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| Larson |
And “we need this,” yeah.
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| Kilgannon |
And they were a force that was pretty unstoppable, I think.
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| Larson |
Yeah. So, anyway, you can see, all the work that we did, even though it wasn’t directly related to women, it had some meaning. We couldn’t give that up.
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| Kilgannon |
At some point, do you get tired? Or just want to change direction? Or just kind of lay it down for a little bit?
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| Larson |
We got real tired.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah.
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| Larson |
We began to focus more on travel type of stories, after we’d done the documentaries. We had such fun doing those shows over in Eastern Washington that Alice got a grant for. This is the other thing. We got a big grant to do this Take it to the People series, which is the programs you just talked about, with Frederick Douglass and so forth. And we had worked and worked and worked on those grants. And we thought—we just hated grant writing. Just hated it.
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| Kilgannon |
That’s a totally different thing.
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| Larson |
Hated it! “This is not artistic.”
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| Kilgannon |
It’s like begging.
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| Nisbet |
We wrote a lot of them.
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| Larson |
So thank goodness Alice Yee wrote the stuff for the Eastern Washington stuff. She was a great grant writer. But we were over there filming in Eastern Washington. And both Sandie and I said—and we were with a good friend of ours, John Givens, both Sandie and I said, basically, “We can’t take it anymore. We are exhausted with all of this arguing and debating and serious stuff. We just can’t take it anymore. We just are worn to a frazzle.” So we said, “What can we do?” We weren’t going to give up working with each other. What could we do that would be absolutely fun, and have nothing to do with anything politically serious that we can’t face anymore? We just don’t have the energy for it.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, you’ve been going for years.
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| Larson |
And so we said, we like travel. Why don’t we do some travel?
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| Nisbet |
That would be a breeze.
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| Larson |
So we did. With a friend of ours, John Givens. So we ended up starting a company called Small World Productions. And we got into travel videos, travel programming for public television. And lo and behold, it was a success! So we had great fun doing that. It’s been wonderful. We had great trips, a lot of it. And it’s been–
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| Kilgannon |
For aficionados, you’ve worked with Rick Steves for how many years?
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| Larson |
About fifteen, no, ten years, I think we worked with him.
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| Nisbet |
We did five seasons with him.
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| Kilgannon |
Pretty intense.
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| Larson |
And then we did a series with Rudy Maxa.
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| Nisbet |
And Shari Belafonte.
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| Larson |
Shari Belafonte.
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| Nisbet |
And Tom Bodett.
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| Larson |
And now we’ve got a series that we’re really excited about with a man named Richard Bangs; he is an outdoor adventure person who also helped to start Expedia.com. So he’s very computer savvy, and was in on the ground floor.
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| Nisbet |
A lot of contacts.
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| Larson |
Head of Outward Bound.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah.
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| Larson |
And anyway, so this is called Adventures with Purpose. And we just got back from filming in Norway. And before that, we were in Morocco. And we’ve done a show on Egypt and New Zealand.
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| Nisbet |
Switzerland.
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| Larson |
Switzerland.
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| Kilgannon |
So, breaking down different barriers?
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| Nisbet |
We’re saying “we.” We aren’t literally doing the fieldwork. Our company is doing it.
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| Larson |
And we’re very involved in terms of the ideas and all that. But we’re basically retired and enjoying that. But we’re very excited about this. Because this isn’t just travel now. This has a real ecological—
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| Kilgannon |
That peg “with a purpose” means something.
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| Nisbet |
That’s right. So, very timely. One thing, before we wrap up, you mentioned Alice Yee. I just want to say that the two shows we haven’t mentioned, Pat, that we loved, were with Ida Nason and the Women Back When in Kittitas County. Didn’t Alice write grants for both of those?
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| Larson |
Yes.
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| Nisbet |
And those were two—I don’t even know, how much did that play? I don’t know how much play that got on public television. But I thought they were great fun to do. And again, talking about women who were still around in Kittitas County.
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| Kilgannon |
That’s a program where you brought in other women to tell their own stories? And the women from the coal mining area.
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| Nisbet |
Yes. Yes.
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| Larson |
How that happened, we did the first show on history of women in Kittitas County. In the process of doing that, we found really terrific women to do that. In the process, we decided that Ida Nason was just such an interesting—a unique story that we would try to get a grant to direct the program of her, which we did. And then, but before, was it before? I lose track of what we did.
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| Nisbet |
I couldn’t remember.
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| Larson |
We did Curtain Call Grandmother. Which was based upon oral histories of women in Washington.
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| Kilgannon |
Bringing lost and obscure voices out and back.
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| Nisbet |
That was fun.
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| Larson |
And that one, what we did was go through these oral histories.
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| Nisbet |
Wasn’t that a WPA project?
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| Larson |
Well, As Told by the Pioneers was, I think that was a WPA project.
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| Kilgannon |
Yes, it was.
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| Larson |
And then we also did something with the oral histories of the later women from the Washington State Oral/Aural History Program. But the earlier women in this were from the, I think it was called As Told by the Pioneers.
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| Nisbet |
In Seattle, there was oral–
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| Larson |
Mercer Girls and things like that.
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| Kilgannon |
And then there was a bicentennial project all around the state.
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| Nisbet |
Oh, right.
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| Kilgannon |
People collected oral histories. I didn’t know if those were the ones you used.
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| Larson |
Yeah. I think we did, I think we did, for some of them. So anyway, that one we did have, we did—since it was all in Washington State—we carried props.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah, that was the one–
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| Larson |
The reason we hadn’t done the prop business or anything else when we were traveling around the country was that it was just too complicated. We just had to keep it simple. But here we were in Washington State, and we sort of had in the back of our minds, wouldn’t it be fun to be using some more props. So that’s what we did. And we loaded–
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| Nisbet |
We had hat racks in my Honda hatchback.
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| Larson |
And a table, chairs.
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| Kilgannon |
Oh, my.
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| Nisbet |
Yes, a thing with hats, yeah.
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| Larson |
In a little valise. Anyway, we had hats and aprons and actual props like cards, playing cards.
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| Kilgannon |
Well, there’s one performance where you make an entire pan of cinnamon rolls, it looks like. [laughter] You were just rolling the dough during the performance, and in the end, there they are.
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| Larson |
So anyway, we did a lot of stuff that we had a lot of fun with.
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| Nisbet |
And this is fun reliving it.
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| Larson |
It is, it is. This is great.
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| Nisbet |
I would encourage anyone if there is anyone down the road who’s going to be looking at this to give it a shot. Because it’s sort of, you know, the advice is you just get started. You don’t know where it’s going to go. You don’t know exactly what the outcome will be or how you’re going to change. But I think Pat said early on—and I’ve thought about this a lot—how women don’t say, “Well, when I grow up I’m going to be an actress and go around the country doing historical theater,” or, “I’m going to do TV.” But maybe it’s important to kind of give yourself those goals, and go for it. Just get started and work with more confidence. Because it certainly comes as you do it.
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| Larson |
Well, it’s a different age now. I look back and I don’t think I ever had any idea about doing anything. I just had to be busy, for one thing.
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| Nisbet |
Yeah.
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| Larson |
But we used to get backed into almost everything we ever did. And part of that had to do with the fact that you’ve got to take a risk.
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| Nisbet |
That’s right.
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| Larson |
You have to start something. You have to start.
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| Nisbet |
That’s a very good point. You’ve got to take risks.
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| Larson |
And you can’t just sit around and think about it. You’ve got to do it. So you go out and you start. And if that doesn’t work, if you get knocked down, okay, that didn’t work. Then you go and you try something else.
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| Nisbet |
You have to be willing to fall flat on your face. Because if you’re in the theater, and you’re performing, especially in comedies, if it doesn’t work, oh, boy!
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| Larson |
Oh, then you know.
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| Nisbet |
You have to be willing–
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| Kilgannon |
You can see it right there?
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| Larson |
It’s looking at you. [laughter]
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| Kilgannon |
And you had the material. I can’t remember who said it, but there’s a famous feminist quote: “If you knew women’s true story, it would break the world in two.” And I think you had that in you and just went and found this material. And you carried it, and it carried you, just from what I can tell. And it rippled out into the world.
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| Nisbet |
And I want to add to this, since we’re in Olympia, I taught for quite a while at the Evergreen State College. And Pat and I have done a lot of things out there together, too. We’ve taught classes; we’ve done performing; we’ve done workshops out there. And so I think the college has been a real boost to us. I often just teach two quarters because of our television stuff. But really, the college, and people from the college, men and women from the college, have been real promoters and helped us with networking and providing students and audiences and support. You know, really–
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| Kilgannon |
A tremendous resource.
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| Nisbet |
Evergreen was a great resource for the both of us here.
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| Larson |
And I also think that I’ve been very lucky, and I think Sandie would agree on this. But it was just lucky that I’ve had a really nice life in the sense that—and particularly what we’re talking about here, with the Co-Respondents, I’m crazy about history, always have been. I’ve always loved theater. And the opportunity to put these two together is really, really exciting and satisfying to me. I just had a ball. I just had a ball.
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| Nisbet |
And I have to say, Pat really, I mean, she just absolutely took the lead in the history part. And I’ve always loved literature, so I was in la-la land more. [laughter] I just loved theater and literature. But what I realized, getting so involved in this, is how much I came to really love social history. Much of my education was in–
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| Kilgannon |
The drier end of things?
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| Nisbet |
Yeah. I mean, when you’re reading about the abolitionist movement or the suffrage movement, or social change, I mean–
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| Kilgannon |
These are dramatic.
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| Nisbet |
Very dramatic, and very exciting. So I really have my partner to thank for really opening that up. And realizing how much drama you can get out of the past with what might be the driest kind of material, I mean, you just change something to the first person and see how it feels.
And another example of that, I think about today. When I was just not too long ago seeing some of the ceremony of loss about 9/11. And you know, all it was, is a list of names. They’re just reading names, right? You read those names, just read the names in a certain way, or when you look at the Lehrer Report and they have a very quiet tribute to fallen military; I mean images and words kind of open up the world, besides scripts and plays, for what can be done in an honest way. It’s not just being melodramatic. But the performance materials have expanded greatly.
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| Kilgannon |
The power of language.
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| Nisbet |
With the power of language.
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[End Interview.]
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